(PDF) Defending Public Schools: Curriculum Continuity and Change in the 21st Century (DPS Volume 3)

Defending Public Schools: Curriculum Continuity and Change in the 21st Century (DPS Volume 3)
Defending Public Schools

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Defending Public Schools
Volume III
Curriculum Continuity and Change
in the 21st Century

EDITED BY
KEVIN D. VINSON AND E. WAYNE ROSS

Praeger Perspectives

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
t/k
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2004 by Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne Ross
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: t/k
ISBN: 0–275–98295–5 (set)
0–275–98296–3 (vol. I)
0–275–98297–1 (vol. II)
0–275–98298–X (vol. III)
0–275–98299–8 (vol. IV)
First published in 2004
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To
Paula and Olivia
K.D.V.
and
Gail McCutcheon
E.W.R.

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Contents

General Editor’s Introduction: Defending Public Schools, ix
Defending Democracy
E. Wayne Ross
Defending Public Schools: Curriculum and the Challenge xvii
of Change—An Introduction
Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne Ross

Part I History, Context, and the Future of the Public 1
School Curriculum
Chapter 1 An Artful Curriculum/A Curriculum Full of Life 3
Rita L. Irwin
Chapter 2 Old Wine in a New Bottle: Twentieth-Century 00
Social Studies in a Twenty-First-Century World
Perry M. Marker
Chapter 3 Literacy Research and Educational Reform: 00
Sorting through the History and the Myths
Martha Rapp Ruddell
Chapter 4 The Mathematics Curriculum: Prosecution, 00
Defense, Verdict
Cynthia O. Anhalt, Robin A. Ward, and Kevin D. Vinson

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viii Contents

Chapter 5 Science in Public Schools: What Is It and 00
Who Is It For?
Bruce Johnson and Elisabeth Roberts
Chapter 6 Character Education: Coming Full Circle 00
Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs)
Chapter 7 Not the Same Old Thing: Maria Montessori—A 00
Nontraditional Approach to Public Schooling in an
Age of Traditionalism and Standardization
Elizabeth Oberle and Kevin D. Vinson

Part II Critical Issues in Curriculum
Chapter 8 The Military and Corporate Roots of State-Regulated 000
Knowledge
Stephen C. Fleury
Chapter 9 Extreme Takeover: Corporate Control of the 000
Curriculum, With Special Attention to the Case
of Reading
Steven L. Strauss
Chapter 10 The Body and Sexuality in Curriculum 000
Lisa W. Loutzenheiser
Chapter 11 When Race Shows up in the Curriculum: Teacher 000
(Self) Reflective Responsibility in Students’
Opportunities to Learn
H. Richard Milner, Leon D. Caldwell, and Ira E. Murray
Chapter 12 Critical Multicultural Social Studies in the Borderlands: 000
Resistance, Critical Pedagogy, and la lucha for
Social Justice
Marc Pruyn, Robert Haworth, and Rebecca Sánchez
Chapter 13 Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation: 000
Reconsidering the Status of Contentious Idea
William B. Stanley

Notes
Index
About the Editor
About the Contributors

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General Editor’s Introduction:
Defending Public Schools,
Defending Democracy
E. WAYNE ROSS

WHY DO PUBLIC SCHOOLS NEED TO BE DEFENDED?
Why do public schools need to be defended? This may be the first question
some readers have about this multivolume collection of essays, and it’s a good
one. Certainly, the title suggests schools are under attack, and they are. Public
schools in the United States have always carried a heavy burden as one of
the principal instruments in our efforts to create an ideal society. For example,
public schools have been given great responsibility for equalizing gender and
racial inequalities, providing the knowledge and skills that give everyone an
equal opportunity to experience the “American Dream,” producing a
workforce with skills that enable U.S. corporations to compete effectively in
the global marketplace, and preparing citizens to be effective participants in
a democratic society, just to name a few.
Critics of public schools come from across the political spectrum, but it
is important to understand the reasons behind the various criticisms of public
schools. The diverse responsibilities of public schools present a huge chal-
lenge to educators, and even when schools are performing well, it is diffi-
cult, if not impossible, for them to deliver all the expected results when their
mission necessarily entails contradictory purposes. For example:

• Should schools focus on increasing equity or increasing school performance (e.g.,
student test scores)?
• Should the school curriculum be limited to the development of students’ cogni-

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x General Editor’s Introduction

tive processes, or do schools have a responsibility for supporting the development
of the whole person?
• Should public schools serve the interests of the state, or should they serve the
interests of local school communities?
• Should schools prepare a workforce to meet economic needs identified by cor-
porations, or should they prepare students to construct personally meaningful
understandings of their world and the knowledge and skills to act on their world?
• Should schools be an instrument of cultural transmission with the goal of pre-
paring students to adopt (and adapt to) the dominate culture, or should schools
function as an engine for social and cultural change, reconstructing society based
upon principles of progress aimed at amelioration of problems?

It is important not to view the contradictory goals of public education as
merely “either/or” questions as presented above. The terrain of public
schooling, as with all aspects of the human endeavor, is too complex to be
reduced to dualisms.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN A DEMOCRACY1
In his magnum opus Democracy and Education, John Dewey—widely
regarded as America’s greatest philosopher—states that all societies use edu-
cation as means of social control in which adults consciously shape the dis-
positions of children. He continues by arguing that “education” in and of
itself has no definite meaning until people define the kind of society they
want to have. In other words, there is no “objective” answer to the ques-
tion of what the purposes and goals of public schools should be.
The implication of Dewey’s position is that we—the people—must de-
cide what we want our society to be and, with that vision in mind, decide
what the purposes of public education should be. The challenge then is as-
suring that a pluralism of views on the nature and purposes of public schools
is preserved in the process of defining what they should be. This is the prob-
lem of democracy. It also explains why public schools are the object of criti-
cism from various points along the political spectrum (e.g., from liberals and
conservatives) as schools become the context in which we work out, in part,
our collective aims and desires and who we are as a people.
Our understanding of what happens (as well as what various people would
like to see happen) in U.S. public schools can be enhanced by taking a closer
look at our conceptions of democracy and how democracy functions in con-
temporary American society.
Democracy is most often understood as a system of government provid-
ing a set of rules that allow individuals wide latitude to do as they wish. The
first principle of democracy, however, is providing means for giving power
to the people, not to an individual or to a restricted class of people. “De-
mocracy,” Dewey said, is “a mode of associated living, of conjoint commu-

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General Editor’s Introduction xi

nicated experience.”2 In this conception, democratic life involves paying at-
tention to the multiple implications of our actions on others. In fact, the
primary responsibility of democratic citizens is concern with the development
of shared interests that lead to sensitivity to the repercussions of their ac-
tions on others. Dewey further characterized democracy as a force that breaks
down the barriers that separate people and creates community.
From a Deweyan perspective, democracy is not merely a form of govern-
ment nor is it an end in itself, it is the means by which people discover, ex-
tend, and manifest human nature and human rights. For Dewey, democracy
has three roots: (a) free individual existence, (b) solidarity with others, and
(c) choice of work and other forms of participation in society. The aim of a
democratic society is the production of free human beings associated with
one another on terms of equality.
Dewey’s conception of democracy contrasts sharply with the prevailing
political economic paradigm—neoliberalism. Although the term neo-
liberalism is largely unused by the public in the United States, it references
something everyone is familiar with—policies and processes that permit a
relative handful of private interests to control as much as possible of social
life in order to maximize their personal profit.3 Neoliberalism is embraced
by parties across the political spectrum, from right to left, and is character-
ized by social and economic policy that is shaped in the interests of wealthy
investors and large corporations. The free market, private enterprise, con-
sumer choice, entrepreneurial initiative, and government deregulation are
some important principles of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is not new. It is merely the current version of the wealthy
few’s attempt to restrict the rights and powers of the many. Although de-
mocracy and capitalism are popularly understood (and often taught) as “birds
of a feather,” the conflict between protecting private wealth and creating a
democratic society is conspicuous throughout U.S. history. The framers of
the U.S. Constitution were keenly aware of the “threat” of democracy. Ac-
cording to James Madison, the primary responsibility of government was “to
protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Madison believed
the threat to democracy was likely to increase over time as there was an in-
crease in “the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of
life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessing.”4
In crafting a system giving primacy to property over people, Madison and
the framers were guarding against the increased influence of the unpropertied
masses. The Federalists expected that the public would remain compliant and
deferential to the politically active elite—and for the most part that has been
true throughout U.S. history. Despite the Federalists’ electoral defeat, their
conception of democracy prevailed, though in a different form, as industrial
capitalism emerged. Their view was most succinctly expressed by John Jay—
president of the Continental Congress and first Chief Justice of the U.S.

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xii General Editor’s Introduction

Supreme Court—who said “the people who own the country ought to gov-
ern it.” Jay’s maxim is a principle upon which the United States was founded
and is one of the roots of neoliberalism.
For over two hundred years, politicians and political theoretists have ar-
gued against a truly participatory democracy that engages the public in con-
trolling their own affairs; for example, founding father Alexander Hamilton
warned of the “great beast” that must be tamed. In the twentieth century,
Walter Lippman warned of the “bewildered herd” that would trample itself
without external control, and the eminent political scientist Harold Lasswell
warned elites of the “ignorance and stupidity of the masses” and called for
elites not to succumb to the “democratic dogmatisms” about people being
the best judges of their own interests.
These perspectives have nurtured a neoliberal version of democracy that
turns citizens into spectators, deters or prohibits the public from managing
its own affairs, and controls the means of information.5 This may seem an
odd conception of democracy, but it is the prevailing conception of “liberal-
democratic” thought—and it is the philosophical foundation for current
mainstream approaches to educational reform (known collectively as “stan-
dards- based educational reform”). In spectator democracy, a specialized class
of experts identifies what our common interests are and thinks and plans
accordingly. The function of the rest of us is to be “spectators” rather than
participants in action (for example, casting votes in elections or implement-
ing educational reforms that are conceived by people who know little or
nothing about our community, our desires, or our interests).
Although the Madisonian principle that the government should provide
special protections for the rights of property owners is central to U.S.
democracy, there is also a critique of inequality (and the principles of
neoliberalism)—in a tradition of thought that includes Thomas Jefferson,
Dewey, and many others—that argues that the root of human nature is the
need for free creative work under one’s control.6 For example, Thomas
Jefferson distinguished between the aristocrats, “who fear and distrust the
people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher
classes” and democrats, who “identify with the people, have confidence in
them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe . . . depository
of the public interest.”7
Dewey also warned of the antidemocratic effects of the concentration of
private power in absolutist institutions, such as corporations. He was clear
that, as long as there was no democratic control of the workplace and eco-
nomic systems, democracy would be limited, stunted. Dewey emphasized
that democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the coun-
try through its control of “the means of production, exchange, publicity,
transportation and communication, reinforced by command of the press,
press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” “Politics,”
Dewey said, “is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation

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General Editor’s Introduction xiii

of the shadow will not change the substance.” A free and democratic society,
according to Dewey, is one where people are “masters of their own . . . fate.”8
Therefore, when it comes to determining the purposes of public schools
in a democracy, the key factor is how one conceives of what democracy is
and, as illustrated earlier, there are longstanding contradictions about the
nature of democracy in the United States. In the contemporary context,
mainstream discourse on the problems and the solutions for public schools
has been based upon the principles of neoliberalism and manifest in stan-
dards-based educational reform, the subject of many of the contributions to
Defending Public Schools.

WHY ARE WE DEFENDING PUBLIC SCHOOLS?
The editors and authors of Defending Public Schools are not interested in
defending the status quo. Each contributor is, however, very interested in
preserving public schools as a key part of the two-centuries-old experiment
that is American democracy. Public schools are in a centripetal position in
our society and, as result, they always have been and will continue to be
battlegrounds for conflicting visions of what our society should be.
We believe that public schools serve the public, “We, the people.” We
believe that schools should strengthen our democracy in the sense that our
ability to meaningfully participate in the decision-making processes that
impact our communities and our lives is enhanced, not constricted. Educa-
tional resources need to be directed toward increasing people’s awareness
of the relevant facts about their lives and increasing people’s abilities to act
upon these facts in their own true interests. Since the 1980s and even be-
fore, the purposes of public schools have been by the interests of the state
and of concentrated private/corporate power, as follows from what I de-
scribed earlier, as neoliberalism. We believe that public education ought to
serve public interests, not the interests of private power and privilege.
At a time when our democracy and many of the liberties we hold dear
are in crisis, we propose that the preservation of public schools is necessary
to reverse antidemocratic trends that have accelerated under standards-based
educational reforms, which intend to transform the nature and purposes of
public schools and our society. Each of the volumes in Defending Public
Schools takes on a different aspect of education, yet these volumes are bound
together by the underlying assumption that preserving public schools is a
necessary part of preserving democracy. The following ten points provide a
synopsis of what defending public schools means to us:

1. The statist view of schools treats teachers as mere appendages to the machin-
ery of the state and seeks to hold them accountable to serving the interests of
state power. Linked as it is to the interests of private wealth, this view defines
children’s value in life as human resources and future consumers. Education

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xiv General Editor’s Introduction

should foster critical citizenship skills to advance a more viable and vibrant
democratic society. Schools should be organized around preparing for demo-
cratic citizenship through engagement with real-world issues, problem solving,
and critical thinking, and through active participation in civic and political pro-
cesses. Informed citizenship in a broad-based, grassroots democracy must be
based on principles of cooperation with others, nonviolent conflict resolution,
dialogue, inquiry and rational debate, environmental activism, and the preser-
vation and expansion of human rights. These skills, capacities, and dispositions
need to be taught and practiced.
2. The current system uses “carrots and sticks” to coerce compliance with an alien-
ating system of schooling aimed at inducing conformity among teachers and
students through high-stakes testing and accountability. This system alienates
teachers from their work by stripping it of all creative endeavors and reduces it
to following scripted lesson plans. We believe that teaching is a matter of the
heart, that place where intellect meets up with emotion and spirit in constant
dialogue with the world around us. We call for the elimination of high-stakes
standardized tests and the institution of more fair, equitable, and meaningful
systems of accountability and assessment of both students and schools.
3. Current federal educational policy, embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act,
sets impossible standards for a reason. Public access to institutions of learning
helps promote the levels of critical civic activism witnessed during the 1960s
and 1970s that challenged the power of the state and the corporations that it
primarily serves. The current reform environment creates conditions in which
public schools can only fail, thus providing “statistical evidence” for an alleged
need to turn education over to private companies in the name of “freedom of
choice.” In combination with the growing corporate monopolization of the
media, these reforms are part of a longer-range plan to consolidate private
power’s control over the total information system, thus eliminating avenues for
the articulation of honest inquiry and dissent.
4. The current system of public schooling alienates students by stripping learn-
ing from its engagement with the world in all of its complexity. It reduces learn-
ing to test preparation as part of a larger rat race where students are situated
within an economic competition for dwindling numbers of jobs. We believe
that educational excellence needs to be defined in terms of teachers’ abilities
to inspire children to engage the world, for it is through such critical engage-
ment that true learning (as opposed to rote memorization) actually occurs.
Students living in the twenty-first century are going to have to deal with a host
of problems created by their predecessors: global warming and other ecologi-
cal disasters, global conflicts, human rights abuses, loss of civil liberties, and
other inequities. The curriculum needs to address what students need to know
and be able to do in the twenty-first century to tackle these problems—and it
needs to be relevant to students’ current interests and concerns.
5. Teachers matter. Teaching is a public act that bears directly on our collective
future. We must ensure the quality of the profession by providing meaningful
forms of preparation, induction, mentoring, professional development, career
advancement, and improved working conditions. High learning standards
should serve as guidelines, not curricular mandates, for teachers. Restore teacher
control, in collaboration with students and communities, over decision mak-

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General Editor’s Introduction xv

ing about issues of curriculum and instruction in the classroom—no more
scripted teaching, no more mandated outcomes, no more “teacher-proof” cur-
ricula. Local control of education is at the heart of democracy; state and na-
tionally mandated curriculum and assessment are a prescription for totalitari-
anism.
6. In the past two decades, the corporate sector has become increasingly involved
with education in terms of supplementing public spending in exchange for
school-based marketing (including advertising space in schools and textbooks,
junk fast-food and vending machines, and commercial-laden “free” TV). We
believe that students should not be thought of as a potential market or as con-
sumers, but as future citizens.
7. All schools should be funded equally and fully, eliminating the dependence on
private corporate funds and on property taxes, which create a two-tiered edu-
cational system by distributing educational monies inequitably. Include universal
prekindergarten and tuition-free higher education for all qualified students in
state universities.
8. Children of immigrants make up approximately 20 percent of the children in
the United States, bringing linguistic and cultural differences to many class-
rooms. Added to this are 2.4 million children who speak a language other than
English at home. Ensure that the learning needs of English language learners
are met through caring, multicultural, multilingual education.
9. Citizens in a pluralistic democracy need to value difference and interact with
people of differing abilities, orientations, ethnicities, cultures, and dispositions.
Discard outmoded notions of a hypothetical norm, and describe either all stu-
dents as different, or none of them. All classrooms should be inclusive, meet-
ing the needs of all students together, in a way that is just, caring, challeng-
ing, and meaningful.
10. All students should have opportunities to learn and excel in the fine and per-
forming arts, physical education and sports, and extracurricular clubs and ac-
tivities in order to develop the skills of interaction and responsibility necessary
for participation in a robust civil society.

In the end, whether the savage inequalities of neoliberalism—which define
current social and national relations as well as approaches to school reform—
will be overcome depends on how people organize, respond, learn, and teach
in schools. Teachers and educational leaders need to link their own inter-
ests in the improvement of teaching and learning to a broad-based move-
ment for social, political, and economic justice, and work together for the
democratic renewal of public life and public education in America.

***
I would like to acknowledge the many people who have contributed to
the creation of Defending Public Schools.
Each of my coeditors—David Gabbard, Kathleen Kesson, Sandra
Mathison and Kevin D. Vinson—are first-rate scholars, without whom this
project could never have been completed. They have spent untold hours

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xvi General Editor’s Introduction

conceiving of, writing for, and editing their respective volumes. I have learned
much from them as educators, researchers, and as advocates for more just
and democratic schools and society.
I would also like to acknowledge the truly remarkable contributions of
the chapter authors who have provided Defending Public Schools with cut-
ting-edge analysis of the most recent educational research and practice. I
know of no other work on issues of public schooling that brings together a
comparable collection of highly respected scholars, researchers, and practi-
tioners.
I would be terribly remiss not to acknowledge the tremendous support
and invaluable advice I have received from my editor, Marie Ellen Larcada.
Defending Public Schools was initially envisioned by Marie Ellen, and she has
been an essential part of its successful completion. Additionally, I would like
to thank Shana Grob who, as our editorial assistant, was always attentive to
the crucial details and made editing these four volumes a much more man-
ageable and enjoyable job.
Thanks also to the folks who inspire and support me on a daily basis,
comrades who are exemplary scholars, teachers, and activists: Perry Marker,
Kevin Vinson, Steve Fleury, David Hursh, Rich Gibson, Jeff Cornett, Marc
Bousquet, Heather Julien, Marc Pruyn, Valerie Pang, Larry Stedman, Ken
Teitelbaum, Ceola Ross Baber, Lisa Cary, John Welsh, Chris Carter, Curry
Malott, Richard Brosio, and Dave Hill.
Lastly, words cannot express my love for Sandra, Rachel, and Colin.

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Curriculum and the Challenge
of Change—An Introduction
KEVIN D. VINSON AND E. WAYNE ROSS

Increasingly, American public schools have been placed under unprecedented
scrutiny and have been held up to immense, even dangerous, criticism. No
doubt, the recent emphasis on the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and
its related stress on standards-based educational reform (SBER—especially
high-stakes standardized testing) has played a major role here. Moreover, and
perhaps for some surprisingly, such criticism has come from the entirety of
the pedagogical-political spectrum, both the Left and the Right—that is,
contemporary public school negativity has drawn from arguments grounded
across the ideological gamut.
All of this, of course, has special relevance to curriculum. The Rightist
critique developed, in its modern guise, most directly, in our view, from the
1983 publication of A Nation At Risk. Arguably, therefore, NCLB (and
related reforms) is its direct descendent. A Nation At Risk maintained that
the growing “mediocrity” of American public schools was causing an alarm-
ing degree of political and economic failure—that is, that underperforming
schools were threatening the economic and political status of the United
States in a world that was increasingly and competitively globalizing.
Quite simply, the specifics of this conservative critique (see Oberle and
Vinson, this volume) are that:

1. standards are too low;
2. schools replicate and extend the worthless theories of the “educational establish-
ment”;

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xviii Introduction

3. public education is a monopoly;
4. content is neglected in favor of process and “self”;
5. progressivism rules to the detriment of more effective direct instruction;
6. cultural relativism trumps traditional values;
7. parents’ roles have been usurped by “educrats”; and
8. public schools seek to solve problems by “throwing money” at them when this
is not necessarily the correct—or even a reasonable—solution.

For many of us who wish to defend public schools and schooling, these
criticisms are clearly preposterous. If anything, the opposite of this perspec-
tive is the case. Perhaps, for example, schools are underfunded, educational
experts have too little influence (given the increasing role of corporate and
government leaders), and curriculum and instruction are too traditional (in
their emphases on nationalistic, fact-based content and so-called Judeo-
Christian ideologies). In any event, this line of condemnation aimed toward
public schools is, at the very least, (1) off-base (in many cases, anyway), (2)
unfair, and (3) deserving of a rigorous and substantive resistance or reaction.
On the other hand, the traditional liberal critique—perhaps founded in
large measure in the progressive movement popularized during the early part
of the twentieth century—suggests that schools:

1. stifle freedom and creativity in favor of conformity and discipline;
2. are dominated by non-educators (e.g., corporations/corporate leaders, politi-
cians);
3. are too centrally controlled;
4. focus overwhelmingly on fact-based, standardized content to the detriment of
student needs and interests;
5. are hypertraditional in terms of purpose, curriculum, instruction, and assessment;
6. emphasize homogeneity over the more significant issues of diversity and differ-
ence;
7. neglect neighborhoods and local communities; and
8. are underfunded.

While, to a large degree, we are more sympathetic to the Left/liberal view-
point, we also accept that many currently employed public classroom teachers
are doing everything they can to counteract these conditions and claims. To
the extent to which such criticisms indeed are valid, often they are merely
the reproductive dictates of the systematic powers that be.
Regardless of opinions and of contingent and evolving political climates,
any discussion of curriculum today—the early twenty-first century—must take
into account the meanings and consequences of NCLB and SBER, for this
conjoined “movement” frames the development and actualization of con-
temporary schooling in all its assorted aspects. As we have previously asserted,
as currently posited and understood, NCLB/SBER is simultaneously (1) anti-
democratic, (2) oppressive, (3) inauthentic, and (4) disciplinary/
conformative.1 To make matters worse, the intentions of NCLB/SBER re-

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Introduction xix

main consistent with and reinforce the educational blended agendas of both
political-pedagogical liberals and political-pedagogical conservatives (in what
we have termed the “will-to-standardize” or the “standardization impera-
tive”), especially in a power-based and hierarchical manner. Nonetheless, it
remains the dominant setting within which modern-day curriculum work
occurs. And, thus, no matter what, it must be taken seriously.

GENERAL THEMES
One point—if not the point—of this book is to defend public schools
against the vast array of current criticism from both the Right and the Left
and to decide whether there are any real, meaningful differences (at least
between traditional conservatives and liberals) in their various complaints and
their variously construed and effected results and agendas. As such, the chap-
ters in the volume address a multiple range of contemporary concerns rela-
tive to American public schooling and education.
Defending Public Schools: Curriculum and the Challenge of Change aims
to support public schools specifically with respect to the curriculum as it
exists—and could or should exist—today. Although critical, the authors here
generally are critical principally via the conditions and limitations imposed
on schooling by those who control its complex and power-laden (post)-
modern functionings (e.g., governments, corporations) and not of public
schooling—overarchingly—or its underlying and productive ideals per se.
That is, although we know, of course, that not all teachers are good teach-
ers and not all the curricular and instructional decisions they make are good
decisions, we still support their continuing and remarkable efforts—as well
as those of parents, students, and administrators—especially as they strive to
do their very and underappreciated best under frequently less than optimal—
and even less than supportive—circumstances (to say, in our view, the least).
To this end, each chapter included in this volume incorporates a number
of related ideas and addresses several connected and timely themes. The
authors all, for instance, offer a critique of the contemporary state of public
schooling. While, initially, this might seem rather incompatible or inconsis-
tent with the goal of defending public schools, in fact it really is not. For, in
each case, the authors advance a discussion of both positive and negative
characteristics and do so with the knowledge and optimism that education—
particularly the curriculum—can, and should, be better. Certainly we—teach-
ers, our children, and society at large—deserve nothing less than an honest
and sincere appraisal.
Second, each chapter pursues alternatives. In other words, the authors
present not simply criticisms but also concrete suggestions regarding how
contemporary American public schooling might improve and how, more
fundamentally, it, structurally, might reach its commendable and laudable
historical and foundational goals.

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xx Introduction

Lastly, Defending Public Schools: Curriculum and the Challenge of Change
extends hope, because, in the end, each of the contributing authors is a long-
term, dedicated, and quintessential advocate of public education. Each be-
lieves, centrally and wholeheartedly, that (1) the purposes of public schooling
are essential and admirable; (2) we—in terms of both schooling and society—
can always do more; and (3) the fundamental aims of publicly supported
schooling—the advancement of democracy, opportunity, equality, freedom,
and justice—and practice as constructed today ought to be of principal con-
cern to all American citizens. No matter what one’s beliefs or attitudes, the
future of society is inextricably linked not only to public schooling but also
to our children and their everyday lives and life chances.

THE CHAPTERS
The authors in part I of this volume provide an overview of the history,
context, and future of the public school curriculum. Obviously, the subject
matters, and each author investigates the ways in which the core content in
public schools is constructed within particular historical and sociopolitical
contexts, and assesses the current and future status of these subjects within
the curriculum of public schools.
The arts in education have seldom enjoyed a central role in the curricu-
lum of public schools, and educators have often relied on arguments out-
side the arts to prove their worth within the curriculum. In chapter 1, Rita
L. Irwin argues that the arts are worth defending for a variety of reasons,
with the most noteworthy residing within the arts themselves. Even though
our public schools could be strengthened with more resources, both finan-
cial and human, they need to be recognized for the strengths they already
bring to the learning enterprise. Irwin illustrates how learning in and through
the arts provides an education that opens minds to alternative ways of think-
ing and being, to the process of creating one’s self, to nurturing a sense of
excitement and passion for learning, and to appreciating the diversity of
cultures in which we live. Using the arts to strengthen learning in other sub-
ject areas could be considered a valuable secondary outcome, but for Irwin
(and many other educators) the primary reasons for including the arts within
the curriculum reside within the qualities of the artistic experiences them-
selves.
In chapter 2, Perry M. Marker observes that, for more than a century,
the social studies curriculum has been relatively unchanged, and yet, ironi-
cally, for more than a century, social studies has had an identity crisis. Soci-
ety has changed remarkably since 1916 when the report of the National
Education Association Committee on Social Studies—which still defines
much of the social studies curriculum—was issued. From transportation to
technology, from social life to sexual mores, life at the turn of the twenty-
first century would be virtually unrecognizable to those living in 1916. In-

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Introduction xxi

credibly, during the same period of time, the social studies curriculum has
remained virtually static. Marker describes contemporary social studies as
ensnared in a history-centered, discipline-bound, nonpartisan, and moribund
curriculum, designed for a particular time and society; situated at a particu-
lar intersection of class, race, and gender; and immersed in an ethic influ-
enced by the industrial revolution and capitalism. This chapter explores the
past, present, and future of social studies in contemporary American society.
In her chapter on “Literacy and Educational Reform,” Martha Rapp
Ruddell describes how popular (and some professional) opinion today holds
that literacy achievement in the United States has suffered an ongoing down-
ward spiral since a mythical golden period of high achievement, that the cause
of this downward trend was the widespread and thoughtlessly careless use
of instructional practice not supported by research, and that the current “re-
search-based” instruction—heavily steeped in systematic phonics and skills-
first reading and writing instruction—is the answer to all the literacy
achievement “problems” that need to be fixed. Indeed, the latest federal
education policy, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, not only endorses
such instruction but also mandates yearly standardized testing of all children
above second grade to “assure” that skills have been learned. Contrary to
this view, Ruddell presents a history of American literacy instruction that is
marked by periods in which new concerns about our children’s literacy arose,
followed by research efforts and instructional reforms that were undertaken
to counter these concerns, and resulting subsequent periods where yet other
questions surfaced. Ruddell illustrates how the questions asked in these cycles
of periodic concern had direct influence on the research and instruction that
followed. She further demonstrates the existence of a cyclical pattern of con-
cern-research-reform that belies the notion that great waves of literacy in-
struction in this country were baseless, unresearched, and atheoretical.
Ruddell’s chapter traces the development of research and reform in Ameri-
can literacy instruction and highlights the ways in which public and profes-
sional concern shaped research trends and instructional practice. It provides
an analysis of current reforms and the research base for those reforms.
With the possible exception of reading/language arts, no subject area
enjoys as much, and as widespread, approval for inclusion in the school cur-
riculum as does mathematics. Whether viewed as one of “the basics” (i.e.,
one of the “3 Rs”), as problem-solving, as skill acquisition, as intellectual/
applied process, or as the learning of specific content knowledge (etc.), math-
ematics maintains support from across the pedagogical and ideological spec-
trum—from essentialists to progressives, from traditionalists to radical
educational critics. And yet, simultaneously, it is a discipline that faces fre-
quent, sustained, and extensive challenges, both warranted and unwarranted.
In their chapter, Cynthia O. Anhalt, Robin A. Ward, and Kevin D. Vinson
raise and pursue the following questions: Historically, what has been the place
and purpose of mathematics education? What is the current “state of the

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xxii Introduction

field” (e.g., best practice, standards, competing dominant views, and so on)?
To what extent, and on what bases, is mathematics education currently un-
der attack? What is exemplary about contemporary mathematics education?
And, where do we go from here? They conclude by considering both the
positive and negative aspects of contemporary mathematics education, com-
ing down, in the end, on the side that says that mathematics education de-
serves to be defended, that it is vital, and that it warrants vis-à-vis its special
position relative to the often underrated status, standing, place, and devel-
opment of the school curriculum and, more broadly, of American public
education.
For over 100 years, what constitutes science in public schools has swung
between an emphasis on content and an emphasis on process. In chapter 5,
“Science in Public Schools: Where Is It, What Is It, and Who Is It For?”
Bruce Johnson and Elizabeth Roberts describe how these shifts have been
closely related to changes in perceptions of the purpose of public schools.
For science, the debate has been between preparing future scientists and
helping all people understand science and its applications in their lives.
Johnson and Roberts argue that current national education policy empha-
sizes both content and process, challenging schools to both prepare future
scientists and ensure that all learners become scientifically literate. But to
achieve this goal, science teaching must de-emphasize facts and engage stu-
dents to construct conceptual understanding and to reason scientifically.
These lofty aims face harsh realities in the classroom. Systemic and political
challenges, such as high-stakes testing and “structure of the disciplines”
models, limit time for science in elementary schools and reinforce traditional
pedagogy in high schools. Regardless, Johnson and Roberts remain optimis-
tic. Public education can and should both prepare all students to understand
what science is as well as provide the foundation needed for those who want
to pursue science careers. The primary purpose of science in public school,
they argue, should be science literacy for all.
In chapter 6, Four Arrows (aka Don Trent Jacobs) examines an issue that
cuts across the entirety of the public school curriculum—“character educa-
tion.” In this chapter, he summarizes historical, contemporary, and reform
issues pertaining to character education from a variety of directions, includ-
ing a highly suggestive American Indian perspective that has been little un-
derstood in mainstream education. In assuming that it is most important for
students to emerge from public schools with the ability to reflect spiritually,
reason autonomously, and act virtuously for the greater good, Four Arrows
presents indigenous world views full circle into the current conversation
about school priorities while at the same time offering a concise overview
of the journey.
Frequently when people think about contemporary U.S. public school-
ing, a particular set of dominant and dominating images comes to mind. Too
often, the popular and “official” view is that all schools and classrooms are

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Introduction xxiii

and should be the same—even across grade levels and subject areas. In fact,
some of the harshest criticisms of public education center on its “unwilling-
ness” or “inability” to change or to try different and alternate approaches.
Even in this current age of standardization and conformity, certain power-
ful critics (ironically) condemn instruction, teachers, curriculum, and so on,
for being too slow to experiment and to move away from “entrenched” and
“ineffective” pedagogies. Moreover, those “experimental” and “nontradi-
tional” efforts that do exist—for example, Montessori Schools—are com-
monly perceived either as elitist or as only implemented in private or parochial
schools. In chapter 7, “Not the Same Old Thing: Maria Montessori—A
Nontraditional Approach to Public Schooling in an Age of Traditionalism
and Standardization,” Elizabeth Oberle and Kevin D. Vinson examine
Montessori education—both in theory and practice—as a reasonable, signifi-
cant, and meaningful mode of public schooling, one that potentially chal-
lenges many of the condemnations levied by current pedagogical critics.
Oberle and Vinson consider (1) the meanings of Montessori education, (2)
the extent to which Montessori education has made impressive inroads vis-
à-vis public schooling, (3) the advantages of public Montessori education,
and (4) how an understanding of the relationships between Montessorianism
and the goals of public education might help advocates defend the work-
ings and successes of twenty-first-century American schooling—curriculum,
instruction, assessment, and policy.
In part II of Defending Public Schools: Curriculum and the Challenge of
Change, the contributing authors take on enduring and critical issues that
affect all subject matter areas. In chapters 8 and 9, Stephen C. Fleury and
Steven L. Strauss examine the state regulation of knowledge and curriculum.
In “The Military and Corporate Roots of State- Regulated Knowledge,”
Fleury argues that, depending on a person’s ideological thermometer and
occupational position, “the State regulation of knowledge” may character-
ize a finely honed process for ensuring that citizens have access to (and are
protected with) the best knowledge available in society. For others, however,
this phrase may evoke images of a myopic redundancy by legions of bureau-
crats or oppressive manipulation by privileged groups. There is a political
process for how something becomes “official knowledge,” and increasing
regulation of this process is tied to the interest of corporations and the mili-
tary. Fleury describes how the decentralizing shift in state control, ostensi-
bly deregulating knowledge, has unleashed economic and cultural forces that
pragmatically enable the dominance of a Rightist ideology through texts and
testing.
Corporate interests and the regulation of reading education is the sub-
ject of Strauss’s chapter, “Extreme Takeover: Corporate Control of the Cur-
riculum, with Special Attention to the Case of Reading.” Corporate America
has not been secretive about what it expects schools to accomplish in the
field of reading. Through its Business Roundtable Education Task Force, it

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xxiv Introduction

has made clear that it sees itself in a life-and-death struggle with Corporate
Europe and Corporate Asia for control of the world’s markets. It is pinning
its very survival on a retooled U.S. labor force that possesses the highest
possible levels of “twenty-first century literacy skills.” These skills include data
manipulation, information management, software troubleshooting, and, in
general, the ability to “read instruction manuals.” The attainment of such
skills via schooling is the centerpiece of Corporate America’s education
agenda. Strauss describes how the federally mandated curriculum on read-
ing, as expressed in No Child Left Behind, was lauded by the Business
Roundtable, two of whose members are on President Bush’s education ad-
visory committee. The core component of the curriculum is intensive and
direct instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness, in which young chil-
dren process letters on a page and manipulate the resulting sounds to form
words. To the authors of NCLB, this represents the most elementary form
of information processing, the core skill that, through accumulated and
aggressive drilling and backed up by high-stakes testing and accountability,
becomes a more complex information processing skill, ultimately leading to
the creation of a “twenty-first century knowledge worker.” Strauss argues
that the formulation of the “neophonics” curriculum by federally funded
scientists, and the mandating of this curriculum by Congress, indicates the
extent to which corporate control of the reading curriculum is achieved by
its control over the government and its research and scientific agencies.
Looks, body size, and sexual orientation are key elements in the make-it-
or- break-it world of peer acceptance and popularity. These social markers
are the cultural capital of adolescent society. In “The Body and Sexuality in
Curriculum,” Lisa W. Loutzenheiser pursues “sex, sexuality, and body im-
age” as “the currency of adolescent culture” as she interrogates “the ways
in which youth navigate their various identities and how schools make vis-
ible the terrain of normative behavior and the unattainable standards set by
the dominant culture.” Focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and
queer (LGBTQ) young people, Loutzenheiser considers “social pressures,”
“familial pressures,” “academic pressures,” and other pertinent issues rela-
tive to sexuality and to sexual identities, specifically in terms of two “con-
structed vignettes” (centering on the fictional “Marion” and “George”).
Following discussions of the misrepresentation of gender and sex, the na-
ture of queer theory, and ways in which schools and educators can combat
heterosexism and homophobia in the classroom, she concludes by arguing
that “Turning a critical eye toward the normative and normalizing and ex-
ploring their place in the classroom through a lens of queer, queer theories,
fluidity, and nonessentializing identity categories may offer all of those who
think and theorize about teaching and learning a productive path toward
working with, amongst, and across differences.”
In chapter 11, “When Race Shows up in the Curriculum: Teacher (Self)
Reflective Responsibility in Students’ Opportunities to Learn,” authors H.

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Introduction xxv

Richard Milner, Leon D. Caldwell, and Ira E. Murray explain pertinent is-
sues around the influence and the intersection of race and curriculum. The
authors argue that teachers need to develop the skills and knowledge neces-
sary to reflect on their own experiences where race and the curriculum are
concerned. They discuss how strategies for introspection can lead teachers
to place a greater emphasis on racially inclusive classroom contents and prac-
tices and how interventions addressing color blindness and assumptions of
Eurocentric universality could prove effective as teachers grapple with ways
to better meet the needs of racially diverse students (pedagogically and philo-
sophically). Milner, Caldwell, and Murray point out that students of color
often operate in classrooms that do not meet their affective, social, and in-
tellectual needs. As a result, many of these students become educationally
marginalized, which exacerbates achievement gaps and myths of anti-intel-
lectualism in non-white communities, especially African American and His-
panic communities. They argue that the explication of race-based educational
disparities infrequently includes discussions about the characteristics of teach-
ers, such as racial identity or racial attitude. This chapter sheds light on this
oversight and suggests strategies for increasing the awareness of racial atti-
tudes in the discourse of and on curriculum development. With the ever-
widening achievement gaps and their social and economic implications, the
authors believe we can no longer afford to focus solely on the characteris-
tics of the student without focusing on the characteristics of the teacher.
In their chapter on critical multiculturalism, Marc Pruyn, Robert
Haworth, and Rebecca Sánchez explore their attempts to use a contraband-
inspired—critical—pedagogy for social justice both within the social studies
teacher education courses they teach and the K–12 classrooms where they
most recently served as teacher/learner pedagogues. They review the foun-
dations of the critical pedagogy movement—with particular emphasis on
Latin America and North America—and then lead readers empirically
through their efforts to enact the principles of a critical and contraband peda-
gogy for social justice relative to both K–12 and pre-service learners in the
diverse U.S./México borderlands in southern New Mexico.
William B. Stanley’s chapter, “Schooling and Curriculum for Social Trans-
formation,” reconsiders the status of perhaps the most contentious idea in
education. Developing a curriculum for social transformation has had a long,
troubled history. For over two centuries, various groups and individuals have
proposed plans for using education to transform society in some substan-
tive way; the effort continues. At least since Dewey’s emergence as an influ-
ential curriculum theorist, curriculum for social transformation has generally
been considered a “liberal,” “progressive,” or even “radical” approach to
public education. But one could also argue that, in practice, education for
social transformation has often been proposed to achieve conservative ends.
The current No Child Left Behind legislation is only the most recent case
in point. Stanley makes clear that part of the difficulty in analyzing the

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xxvi Introduction

concept of social transformation is its ever changing and paradoxical nature.
For once, education is successful in achieving its socially transformative ends
(progressive or conservative); it tends to shift to a social transmission or
conservation focus. On a more fundamental level, curriculum for social trans-
formation involves answering the basic question, “What, or whose, knowl-
edge is of most worth?” In addition, we must examine who gets to answer
such questions and on what basis. This chapter presents a reconsideration
of these issues within the context of the current standards-based education
reform movement. The analysis includes a reconsideration of the role of ide-
ology as it relates to curriculum reform as well as recent developments in
critical approaches to curriculum theory.

CONCLUSIONS
Our overall goal—in fact, our deepest wish—is that this volume (as well
as the others in the Defending Public Schools series) will appeal to a broad
sweep of those individuals and groups concerned with public education and
with other engaged (enraged?), involved, and affected school-related stake-
holders. Therefore, we have attempted to create this work in a way that will
appeal across the board (that is, not just in a way interesting to professional
educators or scholars). Overall, we hope that teachers, professors, parents,
policymakers, and others will find what we have done both interesting and
useful. For, in the end, almost everyone wants public schools to succeed. It
is with these purposes in mind that we present this effort.

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— I —

History, Context,
and the Future of the Public
School Curriculum

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Ch1_1-16.pmd 2 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

— 1 —

An Artful Curriculum/
A Curriculum Full of Life
RITA L. IRWIN

As I reflect upon my learning experiences in galleries, theaters, museums,
and community centers, I find myself relearning what many of us know but
gradually disregard under societal pressures. Being in artistically rich envi-
ronments, as spectators or creators, calls us into experiencing the world in
meaningful, holistic ways. In these environments, I am offered a chance to
be transported into a space and time that causes me to feel, perceive, move,
and contemplate in ways ordinary experiences do not allow or encourage.
Instead, I am thrust into the wholeness of my being. I am fully alive. My
senses are recharged, my imagination is ignited, my emotions are revealed,
and my soul unexpectedly finds meaning or questions previously held mean-
ings. I am transformed, created, and/or re-created into a new being, fully
present.
Whereas artistically rich environments call us to experience the fullness
of our humanity, many other environments are often limited to, or defined
by, narrow forms of understanding. Educational environments, and particu-
larly public schools, often are caught between creating environments that
stress narrowly defined notions of high academic achievement and those that
stress realizing our full potential as human beings. In the former, less atten-
tion is often given to knowing through our bodies, emotions, and spirits than
knowing through our minds. Testing and rankings are used to measure com-
petencies, and, ultimately, one’s abilities. In the latter, multiple forms of
understanding are sought to appreciate and critically reflect upon our world.
As such, learning assessments are based upon contextual features,

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4 Defending Public Schools

individualized learning portfolios, and criterion-based forms of evaluation.
For me, an irony exists in this dichotomous view of learning. Whereas an
artistically rich learning environment embraces academic learning in its en-
tirety, an academically focused (narrowly defined) learning environment
erases artistically rich conditions for learning. For me, an artful curriculum
is a curriculum full of life. It is a curriculum that embraces all of our hu-
manity and refuses to erase the conditions needed for every student to reach
his or her full potential.
The arts in education have seldom enjoyed a central role in the curricu-
lum of public schools. This has never been more evident than in our cur-
rent circumstances. Over the last two decades, educators have been forced
to justify the existence of arts programming within educational trends fo-
cused upon standardized measures of achievement. In an effort to convince
decision makers of the centrality of the arts within education, educators have
often relied on arguments outside the arts to prove the worth of the arts
within the curriculum. A popular example is the philosophy that integrat-
ing the arts into the core curriculum strengthens learning in the core sub-
jects. For instance, integrating art into a language arts lesson strengthens the
quality and quantity of learning within the literacy experience. Although I
am not denying this claim, in this chapter, I argue the arts are worth de-
fending for a variety of reasons, the most noteworthy residing within the arts
themselves. It may be that the arts strengthen learning across all subjects in
the curriculum, but their greatest contributions lie in their uniqueness within
the learning enterprise and in their durability to humanity over time. Even
though our public schools could be strengthened with more resources, both
financial and human, schools and teachers who are incorporating the arts into
their overall curriculum need to be recognized for the strengths they already
bring to the learning enterprise. Learning in the arts provides an education
that opens minds to alternative ways of thinking and being, to the processes
of creating one’s self, to nurturing a sense of excitement and a passion for
learning, and to appreciating the diversity of cultures in which we live. Learn-
ing through the arts strengthens all subject areas and nurtures a project-based
learning environment filled with the freedom to learn more than first con-
ceived. Although learning through the arts may be used to justify many arts
programs today, the results of such programming are limited by their sec-
ondary outcomes because the primary reasons for including the arts in the
curriculum reside within the qualities of the artistic experiences themselves.
Furthermore, learning from the arts offers us new ways to perceive all facets
of our lives. To reimagine our very existence as an artistic event allows us to
re-create our personal or public lives and the practices and events within them
as artistically rendered, perceived, valued, and cherished. To lead an artful
life and to conduct our lives in artful ways means taking responsibility for
our feelings, movements, thoughts, and aspirations as we render our lives

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An Artful Curriculum/A Curriculum Full of Life 5

in perceptually significant and meaningful ways. What a powerful way to
experience one’s humanity.

LEARNING IN THE ARTS
All of us should consider how we might define the primary purposes of
our educational institutions and, in particular, our public schools. I tend to
agree with Maxine Greene, who claims that “the primary purpose of educa-
tion is to free persons to make sense of their actual lived situations—not only
cognitively, but personally, imaginatively, affectively—to attend mindfully to
their own lives, to take their own initiatives in interpreting them and find-
ing out where the deficiencies are and trying to transform them. And dis-
covering somehow that there is no end to it, that there is always more to
see, to learn, to feel.’1
It is very possible that individuals could lead good lives without stepping
into a gallery, museum, or concert hall, or knowing the collected works of
well-known artists, musicians, dancers, and actors now and across time.
However, it would be impossible to lead a good life without the arts. Ev-
eryday, we are surrounded visually and audibly with the creative work of
professional and amateur artists as well as the symbol systems from traditional
and contemporary forms of cultural practices. We gather pleasure from these
sensory sources of understanding. We create meaning from their inclusion
in our existence. We adapt and change as a result of their influence. Whether
these sensory sources come to us vicariously through television, advertising,
music videos, movies, hit albums, the Internet, or from live performances
and exhibitions, we experience the arts and should have opportunities to
experience the widest possible spectrum of the arts through our formal
schooling. If we take the purpose of education to be that which I outlined
earlier, then the arts underscore our abilities to make sense of our lives,
cognitively, perceptively, imaginatively, and affectively. By being mindful of
how the arts help us to understand, interpret, analyze, and judge our lives
and the world around us, we discover the endless wonder of our collective
creative potential. The arts are inexhaustible. When I encounter a work of
art, I am provoked to consider an alternative to my previously held under-
standings. When I am in the presence of an original work of art, dance re-
vue, or symphonic performance, I am forever changed. I come away surprised
by the self-discovery or self-creation that has happened in the act of being
present. Experiences such as these are made more powerful when we are able
to view works of art firsthand, to be in their presence. Virtual witnessing can
also be enlightening, but seeing the brushstrokes in a Van Gogh painting
cannot be duplicated in a reproduction. The two experiences are quite dif-
ferent from one another. Then again, I also visit galleries over and over again
so I can be in the presence of the same paintings again and again. Each time

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6 Defending Public Schools

I learn something new, see something I haven’t seen before, and experience
something I haven’t experienced previously. The stained glass windows in a
local church do this for me, too. Whether it is the brightness of the sun-
shine flooding through their mosaics or the teachings of the clergy during
the service,or the life experiences I bring to the event, each time I am in the
presence of these windows I learn something new, see something different,
and experience something I’ve never experienced before.
Learning in the arts provides a rich foundation to explore ideas, sensory
qualities, open questions, and personal feelings through the use of materi-
als and instruments in studio- and performance-based arts practices or
through the use of texts (highlighting arts history, criticism, or aesthetics)
in discourse-based arts practices. Nothing can replace learning in the arts.
Consider this: Few people, if any, would send someone to see a movie for
them. We intrinsically know the value of seeing the movie for ourselves. We
know that the arts should be experienced, not relayed. Teachers who un-
derstand the arts provide us with the space to experience freedom and be
fully alive. They also commit themselves to discovering what they can do to
empower themselves as creators and transformers of the world so that they
are better able to understand how to empower their own students. Teach-
ers and students involved in making or performing the arts through paint-
ing, singing, acting, writing, and moving are inevitably energized to create
something new. The freedom to create allows us to feel the fullness of be-
ing human while experiencing the confidence engendered through making
connections between tradition and innovation. It’s not hard to accept that
the more we know, the more we understand, see, and hear. All those years
of piano lessons gave me a deep appreciation for the skill and virtuosity of
accomplished pianists playing Mozart concertos as well as the deep atten-
tiveness I find listening to Jim Brickman play his solo renditions of roman-
tic interludes. I may not play the piano myself, but I have a relationship with
the piano, its penetrating sound and profound presence. Certainly all my art-
making activities experienced during childhood stayed with me into adult-
hood. The sensations and perceptions I experienced enlarged my aesthetic
understanding of the world, and increasingly, as I invested myself in the arts,
I endeavored to leave my fingerprints upon the visual world. I resisted the
unaesthetic myths of education limited to reading, writing, and ’rithmetic
and embraced the aesthetic education found in and through the arts. Rather
than denying the qualities found in good literature, I denied the rule-bound
nature of the philosophy behind the 3Rs. Because I embraced an aesthetic
education, I look at reading, writing, and arithmetic differently. Reading still
touches me deeply as a result. In fact, let me recall a haunting book I read
this summer entitled The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. Through reading this
book, I was forced to create meaning beyond the cognitive understanding
of the events by creating renditions steeped in my intuition, imagination, and
feelings. The text became an object of my experience as well as a metaphor

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An Artful Curriculum/A Curriculum Full of Life 7

for a related experience in my own life. Consciously, I grappled with life and
death, sexual assault, images of betrayal, and the sounds of fear. I analyzed
family dynamics during grief-stricken years of recovery. I felt, more deeply
than before, the weight of time against the grain of loss. The aesthetic ex-
perience I had in reading this book of fiction created a bodily reaction and
emotional sympathy set within a spiritual risk. Using my imagination, I was
transported into the lives of others and discovered how their lives resonated
with my own. The collective experience I came to feel grounded my sense
of humanity within suffering. I am forever changed through the reading of
this book. Whether as a child or as an adult, the arts have offered me op-
portunities to embrace my freedom to create and transform my realities.
In The Arts and the Creation of Mind,2 Elliot W. Eisner argues eloquently
for a wide range of arts experiences in our public schools. As the title sug-
gests, the arts contribute to the creation of our minds, and they do so by
evoking and provoking imaginative thinking that motivates individuals to
work through their emotionally pervaded experiences. The arts transform our
personal consciousness as well as our socially connected cultures by refining
our senses and our abilities to represent our ideas. The very premise of his
book is that the creation of mind is a process, an act of inquiry, a way of
being and becoming in the world. For Eisner, the arts serve as models for
creating the very best educational experiences possible.
Earlier, I shared how Greene defined the purpose of education. For Eisner,
“education is the process of learning how to invent yourself.”3 At its very
best, education, and I would dare say arts education, recognizes that “as I
create, I create myself,4 or as Eisner might say, as I learn and learn how to
learn, I invent myself. This is a powerfully transforming understanding of
the capacity we have as human beings to create and re-create the world anew
each and every day. The power of the arts may be accepted but how one
goes about teaching the arts can be achieved in a variety of ways according
to a variety of perspectives. This might seem strange to those outside of the
public schools. Surely including the arts in the curriculum is a matter of
having children and adolescents use a variety of materials and media, across
learning modalities (e.g., visual-spatial, auditory, kinesthetic, numerical, lin-
guistic) in developmentally appropriate ways. This seems pretty straightfor-
ward. However, there is more to this scenario. Whenever we choose to see
something from one perspective, we are not seeing it from another, even
within the arts. So as arts educators develop programs in the arts, they are
inevitably creating them according to the way they see the arts, the way they
feel empowered, and the way they feel the arts can best enhance the lives of
their students. In so doing, they are creating an environment for education
in the arts that emphasizes particular means and ends.
Without going into great detail, allow me to share with you eight ap-
proaches to arts education as outlined by Eisner.5 Discipline-based arts edu-
cation is organized around the creative, historical, critical, and aesthetic

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8 Defending Public Schools

dimensions of arts practices and performances. Students learn to create art-
works while also learning how to appreciate and judge exemplary works of
art. Arts education taught through attention to our global visual culture is
concerned with popular culture as well as the “fine arts” and pays particular
attention to the cultural, political, and semiotic implications of the arts across
our multicultural and transcultural societies. For those arts educators inter-
ested in creative problem solving, the field of design, exemplified by the Ger-
man Bauhaus, educates students to become problem solvers for socially
important tasks (e.g., product design, architecture). Arts educators concerned
with releasing the human spirit through creative impulses focus their atten-
tion on creative self-expression. Whereas many arts education perspectives can
be taught, this particular viewpoint suggests that self-expression cannot be
taught, though the conditions for self-expression can be facilitated. Many
who hold this viewpoint believe the arts counteract the repressive nature of
most schooling practices. While several of these perspectives are concerned
with the individual child developing from within, there are others primarily
concerned with learning through the social milieu. Most notably, seeing arts
education as preparation for work is an effort to justify the arts through their
practical economic benefits for society. Advocates of this view suggest aes-
thetic experiences are nice to have but can be acquired outside of school.
Arts education, on the other hand, should teach cooperation, skill develop-
ment, confidence building, refinement of skills, and other attributes related
to helping students become vocationally competitive. The arts and cognitive
development is still another perspective. Educators concerned with learning
how to discern subtle relationships among artistic elements in a work of art
or who are interested in studying the symbol systems of various cultures are
primarily interested in the cognitive character of an aesthetic education. Using
the arts to boost academic achievement is a popular justification at the moment.
Large-scale studies have been conducted in the United States6 and in Canada7
showing that the arts have an effect on some forms of academic achievement,
in particular, computational skills in mathematics. Though these studies show
that learning in the arts promotes stronger forms of engagements with learn-
ing across all subjects, the arts are justified for something other than what
they are. Would we ever teach mathematics to create stronger arts programs?
No. Then why would we justify teaching the arts to create stronger math
programs? Arts educators aligned with this perspective have typically felt
marginalized and use this justification as a last resort for advocating the in-
clusion of the arts in education. A closely related and popular perspective is
called the integrated arts. Through this form of arts education, educators
organize learning experiences around particular historical periods or cultural
studies (e.g., World War II), design elements among the arts (e.g., rhythm),
pursue interdisciplinary concepts across subject matter (e.g., patterns), and
engage in problem solving within project-oriented studies in which the prob-
lem itself requires multiple disciplinary perspectives in order to arrive at a

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An Artful Curriculum/A Curriculum Full of Life 9

successful conclusion (e.g., designing an ecologically sustainable community).
Although these eight approaches to arts education can exist as separate en-
tities, they are more likely to be hybridized among several forms according
to the beliefs of the teacher, the needs of the school and community, and
the economic climate of the times. Given this, what are some principles for
designing arts education programs? Eisner8 and other leading arts educators
encourage a combination of these rich approaches. I suspect most would
agree with me when I say the arts should be valued for their distinctive quali-
ties as they stimulate our need to create works of art through our person-
ally unique forms of artistic intelligences as well as our need to interpret and
assess works of art, and artful forms of inquiry and being alive, in a variety
of cultures in and through time. Any arts programs attempting to nurture
these attributes and qualities will go a long way toward developing the per-
ceptual and imaginative capacities of our youth.
Encouraging the development of perceptual and imaginative capacities is
an important element in arts education. Developing one’s imaginative life
through mindful awareness is a way for human beings to experience life in
vivid detail and, arguably more important, to effect personal and social
change. Greene, perhaps, says it best: “At a time of boredom, disenchant-
ment, and passivity, few concerns seem as important to me as the concern
for imagination, especially as that capacity can be released by encounters with
the arts, and on whose release encounters with the arts depend.”9 Educa-
tion that values the arts and nurtures learning in the arts provides an op-
portunity for students to never be bored, feel defeated, or succumb to a
feeling of futility. Our imaginative capacities are almost magical, for they help
us perceive in new ways that which is troubled, conflicted, and hopeless. Our
imaginations use metaphors to awaken our sensibilities and perceptions as
we connect with others through our passion and compassion. The arts call
us to use images, sounds, and movements to think metaphorically about ideas
in ways that may have previously seemed unconnected. This act of change,
invention, metamorphosis, is what makes the arts so important to all learn-
ing activities.

LEARNING THROUGH THE ARTS
In order to truly know something, I need to “experience” knowing. This
seems pretty commonsensical. Indeed, anything taught purely through rote
learning denies the human need for experience. Despite this widespread
understanding, rote learning is used worldwide. John Dewey,10 an early twen-
tieth-century philosopher and educator, advocated for learning through ex-
perience. Let’s consider this: Why is it that most of us cannot retain facts
we memorized for an exam? I suspect it’s because we didn’t experience that
knowledge. When I have learned something through movement, emotional
response, soulful attachment, or perceptual engagement, I have always

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10 Defending Public Schools

retained my new knowledge. It stays with me. It means something to me. I
understand it in very concrete ways. Schools and the curriculum found within
our schools have something to learn from the arts and from venues that cel-
ebrate and challenge the arts because the arts embrace knowing through
experience.
A recent Canadian study concludes that when students are involved in
learning activities that include the arts, their mathematics achievement scores
increase,11 regardless of whether the arts were integrated into the actual
mathematics activities. The nature of this finding is important. Arts educa-
tion is not provided at the expense of mathematics. In other words, more
mathematics instruction does not necessarily yield higher mathematics scores.
The recent research suggests the opposite: A balanced curriculum, which
includes the arts, actually strengthens all learning. Students engaged with
their own learning are experiencing their own knowledge creation, discov-
ering their own passions, and creating their own minds.
What can we learn through the arts? Because the arts permeate our exist-
ence as human beings, they are valued across all learning experiences. Let’s
see if their breadth and magnitude can even been summarized. The arts pro-
vide (a) pleasurable, sentimental, inspirational, informative, and surprising
experiences; (b) far-reaching economic, social, and political influences; and
(c) insights into society through skillful accomplishments, historical interpre-
tations, and cultural characterizations. The arts also (a) communicate by
generating, recording, and transmitting ideas; (b) act as cultural sources and
resources by helping people form identities and recognize accomplishments
while also destabilizing practices that are problematic; and (c) enhance our
lives by making the ineffable tangible. In very general terms, the arts con-
tribute to our personal efficacy as well as our interconnectedness with all liv-
ing and spiritual entities. Does this summary say it all? Hardly. The arts always
represent more than what can be said. We grasp understanding through the
arts by seeing more, hearing more, feeling more, and being more than can
ever be said or summarized. That is why learning through the arts is so se-
ductive. The arts offer a vehicle for learning that permeates every aspect of
our being and offers opportunities for personal and cultural transformations
throughout the process. Learning through the arts provides a basis for ex-
periential learning that is durable in and through time. By durable, I mean
learning I will remember—learning that lasts.
When I was in grade six, I remember studying Egypt as one of the im-
portant ancient civilizations on earth. To this day, I remember the murals
we drew that represented the life and times of the people, how they dressed,
the jewelry they wore, and the customs they had. I remember the patterns
on their elegant headdresses, the sashes holding up their robes. I fondly think
of the mummies we attempted to make while learning about their funerals
and tombs. The ingenuity and skill required to create the pyramids have
remained a wondrous miracle of the human spirit in my mind. Every time I

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An Artful Curriculum/A Curriculum Full of Life 11

see images of Egypt now I am transported back to that time when I learned
how other cultures are valued for their differences. How did I learn that? I
dare say it wasn’t because someone told me to believe this but rather be-
cause I internalized this understanding. I came to appreciate the aesthetic
appeal of their golden adornments, the commitment they had toward their
gods, and the pride they held for their cultural traditions. I learned this
through my own brief engagement with their ideas by visualizing, moving
through, reading, and imagining who they were and what I could learn from
them. Some day I hope to travel to Egypt to experience their contempo-
rary culture, because deep down inside of me a spark of mystery still exists.
As I reflect upon this and other experiences, I recognize that integration
across subjects is a worthy goal in order to make learning durable. How-
ever, I also recognize that just as the arts benefit other subjects, so too do
other subjects benefit the arts. They all work hand in hand through an em-
phasis upon aesthetic understanding, or a “deep engagement with the sen-
sory experience of the material world.”12 In this way, the arts offer a profound
opening for experiencing the world that cognitive detachment dismisses. We
understand ourselves, our cultures, and our histories through our sensory
and aesthetic experiences. “Work in the arts is not only a way of creating
performances and products; it is a way of creating our lives by expanding
our consciousness, shaping our dispositions, satisfying our quest for mean-
ing, establishing contact with others, and sharing our culture.”13
There are many occasions when teachers need and appreciate the involve-
ment of artists in the delivery of integrative experiences. Artist residencies
are becoming more and more popular within our schools. Although teach-
ing artists can never replace arts teachers, partnerships between the two can
yield exciting forms of collaboration. Even so, as accountability concerns are
considered, administrators and teachers look to artist residencies for their
match between the curriculum and standards set by their districts and boards
and, ultimately, to the results they produce. Arts organizations responsible
for the residencies are increasingly interested in working with teachers, ad-
ministrators, and arts specialists in order to meet the needs of the schools
and to ensure the success of the programs. Artist residencies tend to have
three instructional purposes: to encourage students’ interest in the arts, to
support the development of students’ knowledge and skills within the arts
while integrating the arts into other subjects, and to provide professional
development for teachers endeavoring to teach the arts.14 Although some
residencies might concentrate on one of these purposes, it is more likely that
several purposes will be met. These experiences are expressly designed to
provide learning in and through the arts, but they are also designed for learn-
ing about the arts. When artists spend time in schools, working with students
and teachers, as well as performing their art forms, they are effectively teach-
ing others about their work. I personally feel learning through the arts is
closely related to learning about the arts. Intense experiences with artists

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12 Defending Public Schools

always seem to immerse students and teachers into projects that work across
domains of learning and culminate with products or performances. In my
own research into an artist residency program called Learning through the
Arts TM, my research colleagues and I discovered that the foremost reason
teachers and students are attracted to such a program has to do with the
holistic nature of the arts themselves.15 Even though teachers wanted to use
the arts as a way for integrating subject matter content across disciplines, the
most noticeable integration was far more foundational, yet elusive. Every-
one wanted to have integrative experiences because they were learning ho-
listically.16 Put simply, they were involving their minds, bodies, emotions, and
spirits. They engaged every part of their being in learning. Holistic learn-
ing17 is essential for all learning, and the easiest way to ensure that learning
is holistic is to embrace learning in and through the arts.18 Once teachers
and students are committed to learning holistically,19 commitment can grow
to an exploration of concepts from various disciplines in order to probe for
intellectual depth.
Although learning holistically through the arts is certainly attractive to
many, the greatest gains that might be realized are with disadvantaged stu-
dents from a lower socioeconomic status (SES). James S. Catterall, Richard
Chapleau, and John Iwanaga conducted a large study of over 25,000 stu-
dents over ten years and analyzed the differences between socioeconomic
groups. All students experienced great benefits, but they were especially
noticeable for the low SES students who experienced higher academic
achievement and better attitudes toward school if they were involved in the
arts long-term. “For low SES students, 43.8 % of students highly involved
in the arts scored in the top two quartiles in reading, compared to 28.6 %
for students with little or no arts engagement. When the entire student
sample was considered, 70.9 % of high arts students scored in the top 2
quartiles in reading, compared to 46.3 % of the low arts students.” 20
Catterall, Chapleau, and Iwanaga also found low SES students were twice
as likely to be involved in the arts than other students scoring in the top
quartiles. These results clearly show that the arts have a profound impact
upon student learning, particularly for students who likely have little expo-
sure to the arts outside of school. Learning through the arts has far-reach-
ing benefits for all students in all subjects across the curriculum. Yet we
cannot lose sight of the fact that the arts, as subjects themselves, have dis-
tinctive histories and have made distinctive cultural contributions that make
learning in and about the arts just as important, if not more so, than learn-
ing through the arts.

LEARNING FROM THE ARTS
Education as a whole has much to learn from engagement in the arts.
Learning in the arts and learning through the arts are both important to a

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An Artful Curriculum/A Curriculum Full of Life 13

vital educational program for all students. Yet there is one more twist of
phrase to be considered: learning from the arts. What can the arts teach us
about learning that will inspire excitement, passion, even a love affair with
learning itself? The teaching of art, or for that matter the teaching of any
subject, must be about the artistry of teaching. Eisner says, “By artistry I
mean a form of practice informed by the imagination that employs technique
to select and organize expressive qualities to achieve ends that are aestheti-
cally satisfying.”21 As artists of teaching, teachers learn to see and reflect upon
their practices in an effort to refine their work and to grasp the magnitude
of the work they have created. The very best teachers approach their prac-
tices with artistry as if life itself were a work of art. It is with this idea that
all of us can learn a great deal from the arts. Metaphorically speaking, living
is a form of curriculum. Living becomes a curriculum full of life when we
enact and embody an artful engagement with life itself. We create our fu-
tures, we create our minds, we create our cultures, and we create our expe-
riences. To assume a learning disposition throughout life is to accept that,
through learning, we invent ourselves personally and collectively.
Let me transport you into my studio for a brief excursion into my artis-
tic life before I illustrate for you how I attempt to apply what I have learned
from the arts to my teaching and my being. Last year I painted over twenty
paintings around the theme of trees and, particularly, forests. I live on the
edge of a magnificent cedar forest and, when I am not consumed by the
forest, I am often drawn to the rich variety of trees that line the boulevards.
For quite some time I collected photographs during my walks through the
forest and the groves of trees. During those occasions, I was consumed with
noticing the relationships between the light filtering through the trees and
the shadows on the forest floor, the connections among each distinctive green
(emerald, chartreuse, lime, olive, etc.) and its placement in the setting, and
the relationships between clusters of nearly perfect trees alongside a few tor-
tured, fallen trees. I reflected upon the time of day, the crispness of the air,
the duration of my immersion, and the variety of trails I pursued. Each time
I walked, I knew I would find internal satisfaction as I found the freedom
to contemplate and the time to imagine. Returning from these walks always
felt like a spiritual aesthetic awakening. They were experiences I wanted to
explore in other ways. As a painter, I chose to use the photos as visual stud-
ies for exploring my personal experiences with the forest. Through artistic
inquiry, I sought to explore my emotional responses to these occasions by
painting, not just my memories but my relationships and experiences of be-
ing in the presence of these majestic entities. With each painting, I started
by considering a photograph, noticing particular qualities in the images be-
fore responding emotionally. Then I let the image go so I could begin a new
relationship with each painting. Working with paint and paper, I began to
look beyond the taken-for-granted surface views and went to the underbrush,
or the surfaces below the immediate surfaces. I built up layer upon layer of

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14 Defending Public Schools

color and texture, light and shadow, shape and form. I was resolving a vi-
sual problem through dialogical relationships with each emerging image.
Seldom, if ever, did the final images look “just like” the photograph. They
were never intended to, though one could see a likeness or similarity. Rather,
new experiences grew out of the collection of walks and photographs. These
new experiences helped me to savor my experiences, to feel fully present in
creating new understandings of myself and the world, and to contribute to
the joy of others as they took in the visuality of each painting for themselves.
Painting for me is all about joy, even though there are plenty of times in
which I am frustrated when I have overpainted a section, and I can’t seem
to return to the magic of what I had moments earlier. There are other times
when I am not certain of the intention of each piece— what is it that I am
trying to convey? I have to work through each of these frustrations, and as
I do, an aesthetic dialogue unfolds and I realize a new conversation has be-
gun. I am learning something new again.
So what does this have to do with learning from the arts? As I reflect upon
my walks as artistic events, just as my painting experiences are artistic per-
formances, I find myself contemplating the qualities of what it means to be
engaged in artistic inquiry and an aesthetic way of life. During these experi-
ences, I learned and relearned there isn’t one right answer. How something
is communicated is just as important as what is communicated. I came to
appreciate how my imagination transforms my understanding in unique and
surprising ways and how my aesthetic sensibilities define my quality of life.
I metaphorically came to understand how being purposefully flexible dur-
ing my painting can also be used to enhance my work and play so I am not
tied to particular results. I learned I am interested in relationships, not just
among trees, or between colors, but among people. I learned to slow down
and notice the particular in the taken-for-granted. Lingering in an experi-
ence becomes an act of joy, satisfaction, and humble appreciation, for the
inherently rich qualities embedded in being experientially present. My artistic
way of being reminded me of what life can be if I open the way for its un-
folding vitality.
As I have reflected upon ideas like this over my career,22 I have attempted
to enact my teaching as an art form. At times, this has meant paying atten-
tion to the rhythms of each day and the lessons within, while being careful
to attend to patterns of interactions and spatial relationships between indi-
viduals as well as between individuals and objects. I’ve attended to the col-
ors and textures of my clothing, as well as to the colors in each classroom
and the placement of images on the walls. I’ve become more attuned to the
tonal qualities in my voice during discussions, debates, and casual conversa-
tions and particularly during the storytelling nature of my teaching activi-
ties. I allow my body to move through each classroom in ways that create
interest in each lesson. I attempt to embody the freedom of movement I hope
students will pursue. I have come to appreciate that lessons do not always

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An Artful Curriculum/A Curriculum Full of Life 15

go as planned but that what is more important is the quality of the dialogue,
the learning environment, and the conditions for learning. These qualities
have often sparked my attention to the ineffable, to that quality of experi-
ence that is difficult to talk about yet is easily recognizable by all who expe-
rience it.
Performing teaching as an art form calls teachers into a space of artistic
work many seldom consider. Teachers who attend to their practice as an art
form are often viewed as the teachers we remember years later, those teach-
ers whose practices and processes make just as much difference, if not more,
than the actual products of learning. People follow passion. Everyone wants
to love what he or she does and who he or she is. When we experience teach-
ers who are passionate about their own learning and their work, as learners
we find ourselves motivated to learn for we want what our teachers have. I
remember teachers whose lessons inspired me. I remember how I felt when
I anxiously wanted to learn not only in their classes but also outside of school
when I could pursue the topics in my own way. I remember their joyful pres-
ence, their excitement for learning and teaching. I also remember much of
what I learned in their classes. I don’t know if they thought of themselves
as artful teachers, but to me they were artful teachers inspiring me through
an artful curriculum.
Learning in, through, and from the arts are important conceptions for the
design of curriculum experiences in any learning environment at any age level.
The possibilities for learning are endless if one considers the magnitude of
these ways of learning. As I reflect upon treasured experiences in my studio
or my many long walks in nature or my lingering visits with works of art, I
am struck by the ways the arts have caused me to keep learning out of the
sheer joy and excitement I feel for learning. These experiences might be my
own, but we all have experiences that can be viewed, created, or interpreted
through artistic or aesthetic lenses. Our public schools are important learn-
ing communities for providing the conditions for all students to experience
the very best education by learning in, through, and from the arts. Schools
that partner with artistic venues, such as galleries and museums, as well as
artists, musicians, dancers, actors, poets, and storytellers, recognize the value
of the arts as being larger than any one talented teacher. The arts belong to
all of us, exist in multiple forms within our communities and our society at
large, and should be considered essential to a balanced curriculum. After all,
public schools are places where students can flourish as they realize their full
human potential to think, feel, intuit, imagine, and act, as they engage in
an artful curriculum, a curriculum full of life, a curriculum that embraces what
it means to be humanly present.

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Ch1_1-16.pmd 16 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

— 2 —

Old Wine in a New Bottle:
Twentieth-Century Social
Studies in a Twenty-First-
Century World
PERRY M. MARKER

Social studies educators at the beginning of the twenty-first century are at a
crossroads very similar to their social studies colleagues at the turn of the
twentieth century. The period from the 1870s to the1920s in American
culture saw the most dramatic changes in political economy, technology, and
schooling that have ever taken place in American history. This period saw
the emergence of a large urban society; immigration from Asia, southern and
eastern Europe, and far-reaching developments in industrialism, monopo-
listic capitalism, and school reform.
The period from the late 1980s to the present has been described as the
“information age.” Rapid technological, economic, and political development
has brought us the Internet, cell phone technology, personal computers, and
instant global communications, to name but a few innovations. At the be-
ginning of the twenty-first century, there is intense pressure to reform so-
cial studies education to meet our changing social, political, and economic
demands. Social studies educators are in danger of reproducing the curricu-
lum of 100 years ago, adopting and accepting an unyielding history-based
and corporate-influenced curriculum that renders us resistant to change in
our information age. Maintaining and sustaining a century-old, history-
centered social studies curriculum is akin, in effect, to putting the same stale,
old wine from the nineteenth-century industrial age into the shiny new
bottles of the twenty-first-century information age.

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18 Defending Public Schools

SOCIAL STUDIES AND ITS INDUSTRIAL-AGE ORIGINS
For almost a century, the social studies curriculum has been relatively
unchanged, yet, ironically, social studies has an identity crisis. With little
agreement on its nature and purpose, the dominant perspective regarding
social studies in the twentieth century rested with historians. This group of
scholars has had the greatest influence, in fact, on what has happened in social
studies classrooms. During the twentieth century, the social studies curricu-
lum remained somewhat static and discipline-bound, its scholars trapped in
what Barr, Barth, and Shermis1 called an endless maze, laboring “to project
some order or pattern on the chaos around them.”
Amid this chaos, however, there is, at least, some order. There is general
agreement, for instance, among social studies educators that the 1916 re-
port of the National Education Association Committee on Social Studies had
a profound impact on the social studies curriculum. It was this group of
educators, heavily influenced by the emergence of the industrial state, that
produced the scope and sequence of courses that still define the contempo-
rary social studies curriculum:

Grade K: Self, School, Community, Home
Grade 1: Families
Grade 2: Neighborhoods
Grade 3: Communities
Grade 4: State History, Geographic Regions
Grade 5: U.S. History
Grade 6: Western Hemisphere
Grade 7: World Geography or World History
Grade 8: U.S. History
Grade 9: Civics
Grade 10: World History
Grade 11: U.S. History
Grade 12: American Government

Yet few would argue that society has not changed since 1916. From trans-
portation to technology, from social life to sexual mores, life at the turn of
the twenty-first century would be unrecognizable to those living in 1916.
Incredibly, during the same period, the social studies curriculum has remained
virtually unaltered. Contemporary social studies is ensnared in a history-cen-
tered, discipline-bound, “nonpartisan,” moribund curriculum. This century-
old social studies curriculum was designed for a particular time and society,
immersed in an ethic influenced by a burgeoning industrial age. The social
studies was developed in a time when education was emerging from a cen-
tury of rural, one-room schools to a modern, public system of education that
supported a rising and powerful industrial-based economy. The development
of a system of public education was heavily influenced by powerful business-
men who were leaders of U.S. industrialization. The spread of public school

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Old Wine in a New Bottle 19

education in an age of industry enabled a whole generation of workers to
become the literate labor force of the emerging manufacturing economy.
The development of a factory-like system of public education in the twen-
tieth century was not accidental.2 Educators such as Franklin Bobbitt cham-
pioned the application of F. W. Taylor’s scientific management techniques
to education and schooling. As Herbert Kliebard3 has stated, “he [Bobbitt]
provided professional educators [and businessmen] in the twentieth century
with the concepts and metaphors—indeed, the very language—that were
needed to create an aura of technical expertise without which the hegemony
of professional educators could not be established.” These forces were coa-
lescing to exert an influence over the public schools and the social studies
curriculum that would last throughout the twentieth century.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, history was con-
sidered to be the central social studies discipline around which all others were
organized. The emerging fields of economics, sociology, and political science
were incorporated into university history departments. Barr, Barth, and
Shermis4 have cogently described the influence the field of history exerted
on the emergence of social studies at the end of the nineteenth century: “It
is . . . understandable that the first committees making recommendations for
public school social studies were comprised primarily of historians [and ti-
tans of industry] and were associated with the American Historical Associa-
tion. The American Historical Association was organized in 1884, and one
of its first goals was to promote the study of history in the public schools.”
Historians argued that their discipline was the great repository of classical
ideas and the ideals of humankind. This knowledge, defined by historians,
was deemed essential for citizens to learn if they were to become effective
and knowledgeable citizens. Learning the factual knowledge of history would
“discipline” the mind.5
The decade of the 1920s marked the first time the term social studies was
formally used. In 1921, the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)
was founded by Earle Rugg as part of the American Historical Association
(AHA). In 1935, Edgar B. Wesley broke the NCSS off from the AHA and
coined what is perhaps the most well-known—yet most controversial and
least agreed upon— definition of social studies to date: “The social studies
are the social sciences simplified for pedagogical purposes.”6
Stanley and Nelson7 have described social studies as going through its
most significant period of reform during the 1960s and 1970s. Many new
materials and curriculum proposals were developed that attempted to inte-
grate the social science disciplines into an interdisciplinary social studies focus.
These materials did not have history as their focus but, unfortunately, they
were not widely implemented by social studies teachers in the classroom.
Most social studies teachers continued to rely on history-centered, chrono-
logically oriented textbooks that were based on the fundamental principles
of the 1916 NEA report.

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20 Defending Public Schools

During these times of reform, Stanley and Nelson8 report that eminent
scholars such as Jerome Bruner were beginning to question the value of
studying the structure of the disciplines (i.e., history) in the absence of the
study of “pressing social issues.” Larry Cuban,9 in a review of research re-
garding the history of teaching social studies, argued that during this pe-
riod most changes, such as grouping strategies, interdisciplinary instruction,
an emphasis on social issues, and a sensitivity to ethnic and diversity issues,
were and have been still incremental rather than fundamental to how social
studies is taught. Cuban concluded that what emerges out of social studies
curriculum since the early 1900s are dominant patterns of teaching steeped
in history-based, chronological textbook instruction with a smaller number
of predominantly elementary school teachers who combine teacher-centered
instruction with student discussion, debate, and role playing. Reinforcing
Cuban’s analysis, the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy10
issued a report that recommended, “the focus of schooling [and social studies
teaching] must shift from teaching to learning, from the passive acquisition
of facts and routines to the active application of ideas to problems.”
A specific example is illustrative of Cuban’s analysis. Jane Bernard-Powers11
stated that gender issues have had minimal impact on the social studies cur-
riculum. Bernard-Powers posits that there are profound “gendered issues”
that belong in the social studies curriculum, such as teen pregnancy and death
from gunshots among African American males. But in spite of these press-
ing issues, the social studies curriculum has been slow to address issues of
gender. Nel Noddings12 discusses the current state of affairs regarding femi-
nism and gender in the social studies: “Feminism’s initial effect on social
studies changes the surface to some degree: more female faces and names
now appear in standard texts. . . . Women have gained access to a world once
exclusively maintained for men. On the negative side, social studies as a regu-
lar school subject has been flooded with trivia and is threatened by continuing
fragmentation. Further, the women’s genuine contributions have been
glossed over because they do not fit the male model of achievement.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, the content of history classes in-
cluded historical facts arranged in chronological order, incorporating lists of
dates, names, and significant events related to political, diplomatic, and mili-
tary history. Students were drilled to learn historical information through
memorization, the goal being to provide students with the historical “facts”
necessary to function as good citizens.
Significant elements of this early twentieth-century history-centered or-
ganization of the secondary social studies curriculum can still be found at
the beginning of the twenty-first century. States such as California, Alabama,
Virginia, Texas, and Massachusetts have created history-centered standards.13
The curricula endorsed by these states have, as their primary focus, histori-
cal contents that are driven by fact-based, yearlong chronological survey
courses that emphasize military, political, and diplomatic history. These

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Old Wine in a New Bottle 21

twenty-first-century curricula still retain as their fundamental elements edu-
cational thinking that is over 100 years old.
In spite of research-based evidence to the contrary, contemporary critics
of social studies education14 have lamented the displacement of teacher-cen-
tered chronological history with social studies during the course of the twen-
tieth century. These reformers believe that research supports the idea that
expert problem solvers (effective citizens) are best defined “not in the skills
they possess, but rather in their stores of available, relevant, previously ac-
quired knowledge. . . . This store of historical and civic knowledge [facts,
dates, names] has important consequences for the development of citizen-
ship.”15 Diane Ravitch16 is even more direct: “Today’s field of social studies
is rife with confusion. Its open-ended nature, its very lack of definition, in-
vites capture by ideologues and by those who seek to impose their views in
the classroom. This too can happen in the teaching of history, but at least
students may encounter contrasting versions of history from different teachers
and textbooks, as well as programs on television. . . .”
In other words, these “reformers” believe that history is getting short
shrift in today’s schools. More significant, this line of reasoning asserts that
educators who do not center their instruction upon historical methods and
facts from the leading ideas of Western culture are ideologues bent upon
indoctrinating students into an antidemocratic, unpatriotic social studies
curriculum. These and other like-minded social studies reformers are seem-
ingly determined in sustaining and maintaining the history-centered, chro-
nological, fact-based, teacher-centered curriculum constituted by and
characterized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century educational
thought. Despite Ravitch’s argument that history has been displaced in the
social studies, a close examination of the last 100 years of research in the
socials studies by scholars such as Hullfish and Smith, Stake and Easley, Wiley,
Shaver, Davis and Helburn, and Ross strongly indicates that history instruc-
tion is as popular as ever and is marked by a common pattern of teacher-
centered instruction.17
Perhaps the most often heard and repeated criticism of social studies is
that our students are “historically illiterate” and are losing their “civic
memory.” Critics of social studies have assailed the social studies curriculum
for failing to teach students important facts. They claim that students just
do not know important things, such as the date of our American indepen-
dence, who our sixteenth president was, and so on. Richard Paxton,18 in an
analysis of surveys of students’ historical knowledge, found that the “bulk
of evidence suggests that [American] students today know at least as much
history as their parents and grandparents did—and probably more.” Even
more interesting is that students’ historical knowledge is at the same level
as their knowledge of other disciplines. Students’ scores on surveys of
knowledge in literature and science were lower than social studies scores.
Perhaps the problem is not with the students’ knowledge as much as it is

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22 Defending Public Schools

with the surveys themselves. These surveys spread the false notion that the
biggest problem facing social studies students today is the retention of frag-
mented, decontextualized, historical facts. As for critics who want social stud-
ies to return to the “good old days” of teaching historical “facts,” the
research indicates that the “good old days” are simply and merely a myth.19

“SOCIAL STUDIES SUCKS” AND OTHER ENDURING
PROBLEMS
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it needs to be said, and to
be said often, that many exemplary social studies programs exist and thou-
sands of dedicated social studies educators are doing an outstanding job of
teaching. If we were to listen solely to critics of education, be they conser-
vative or liberal (often nearly indistinguishable), one might question whether
social studies students are learning anything worthwhile at all and, as a re-
sult, if the foundations of our democratic society were about to go to wrack
and ruin. My point is that, it is not these hard-working social studies teach-
ers, but, rather, it is the antiquated curriculum of social studies as it exists
in its broadest terms that is and should be our focus.
Students do not fondly remember the history-centered social studies cur-
riculum. John Goodlad20 asked students about the importance of social stud-
ies as compared with other traditional school subjects. Goodlad reported that
social studies at the secondary level ranked below English, mathematics, and
vocational education and was in a dead heat, in terms of importance, with
science; junior high and senior high school students viewed social studies to
be the least useful subject in their lives.
Students generally find history-centered social studies content uninterest-
ing. I recently asked my university-based, preservice, social studies methods
students to conduct an informal survey of middle and high school students
about their attitudes toward social studies. The methods students were told
to take care not to survey any students in their social studies classes. Of the
more than 150 students interviewed across three middle schools and four
high schools, not one student listed social studies as his or her favorite sub-
ject. Many students found social studies to be irrelevant to their lives, and
many of their comments included the phrase “social studies sucks.” Although
these results are unquestionably unscientific, such candid comments are the
cause of much concern among prospective social studies teachers.
In the past century, tens of millions of students have endured a history-
centered social studies curriculum. In many states, the school year is man-
dated to be 180 days long. School days last around seven hours, excluding
lunch, beginning around eight in the morning and ending at three o’clock
in the afternoon. If a student spends, conservatively speaking, 30 to 50 min-
utes each day in social studies classroom instruction and attends social studies
class every day (subtracting two weeks for testing), the student will have

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Old Wine in a New Bottle 23

logged roughly 90 to 125 hours immersed in a history-centered social studies
curriculum each school year.
During this time, many of the activities that students face daily are with
control, and not learning, in mind. Activities such as reading a chapter in a
textbook and answering the questions at the end of the chapter is a time-
worn, mind-numbing activity that can quickly extinguish the excitement for
learning social studies in even the most motivated students. During many
of the hours spent in history-centered social studies classes, students are learn-
ing less than ever, and the skills of interpreting graphs, charts, and tables are
not being emphasized.
Goodlad described the elementary social studies curriculum as “amor-
phous.” At the secondary level, most students sit in general, survey-oriented
courses where world and American history are taught in one year. In the
secondary social studies classroom, “topics of study become removed from
their intrinsically human character, reduced to the dates and places readers
will recall memorizing for tests.”21
For the past 100 years, much of social studies instruction has been lim-
ited to using the standard textbook. Teachers use the textbook because it
helps them neatly organize history into “bite-sized” teaching units for the
classes they teach. However, textbooks are steeped in a fact-based, chro-
nological presentation of history that is disconnected from and irrelevant
to the lives of the students who use them. As many as two-thirds of all social
studies teachers rely on a history or American government textbook and
use it as their dominant teaching resource. Unfortunately, most of us have
who have read a social studies textbook know it as anything but a “page-
turning” experience. In fact, it is highly recommend as a cure for insom-
nia.
Learning history via a textbook is uninteresting at best and misleading at
worst. James Loewen, in a comprehensive content analysis of American his-
tory textbooks, Lies My Teacher Told Me, has stated that textbooks give stu-
dents no compelling reason to like or appreciate social studies.22 Textbooks
are generally unscholarly, political documents that attempt to inspire patrio-
tism without encouraging students or teachers to ask questions about the
historical issues between their covers. Loewen asserts that history textbooks
provide a “rhetoric of certainty” that promotes historical “truth” and dis-
courages critical analysis of the events, facts, and issues included in them.
Loewen found that textbooks supply irrelevant, erroneous details and often
omit pivotal facts about marginalized peoples. While supporters of textbooks
argue that textbooks have improved dramatically in recent years, textbooks
are failing now, more than ever, to connect a chronological, history-centered
curriculum to the lives of students. The more we use history textbooks as
the primary source of information in social studies classes, the more likely
that students will receive a social studies education that is incomplete, in-
correct, and uninspired.

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24 Defending Public Schools

Gary K. Hart, former secretary of education for the state of California,
recently returned to the classroom teaching ninth-grade history. As secre-
tary of education, he helped implement a history-based curriculum and wrote
guidelines on what textbooks to use. As a social studies teacher, Hart has
abandoned a chronological approach to teaching history and moved to a
nonchronological, intense study of selected topics. Since his conversion from
a history-centered curriculum, Hart believes that social studies teachers need
more freedom to innovate in the classroom.23
With teachers focusing generally on history and government, and using
textbooks as the main instructional vehicle, there is precious little interdis-
ciplinary teaching being conducted and little focus on relevant social issues
and themes. History is taught as though all students were destined to be
historians. This should not be a surprise. University history departments are
filled with professors who give lecture after lecture to their students. A walk
past the classrooms of many professors of history will lead one to wonder
whether historians have yet discovered that the chairs in which their students
are sitting in neat rows listening to their lectures are no longer bolted to the
floor.
After having been subjected to years of lectures, eager history majors en-
ter the public school classrooms armed with their lecture notes and a his-
tory textbook, ready to teach in the style in which they have been taught.
These prospective social studies teachers have themselves been students for
twelve years in public schools and four or more years in the universities. They
have been passive recipients of hour upon hour of history-based, teacher-
centered instruction. Sixteen years of history-centered instruction is difficult
for many, and often impossible for some, prospective teachers to “unlearn.”
More significant, images of the “great lecturer” who holds students spell-
bound for hours while spinning his or her historical yarns is a powerful and
seductive educational icon. Even though most of us have seen very few, if
any, of these icons in action, their aura is very alluring.
The fact is, in most public school and university history classrooms, vir-
tually no attention is paid to the relationship between and among the social
science disciplines. For over 100 years, history has been taught in our schools
and universities without an interdisciplinary focus on the social sciences.
Though the term social studies is used to describe the history-centered cur-
riculum taught in elementary, middle, and high schools, the interdisciplinary
focus that the term implies is, ironically, rarely taught. Perhaps Henry Ford
meant to say: “History without social studies is bunk.”

TEACHING TOWARD THE FUTURE
Teaching toward the future requires that we examine critically the values
and those traditions of the past (e.g., small schools, community-centered
lifestyles, communities of learners) that have been extinguished by the in-

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Old Wine in a New Bottle 25

dustrial age. These traditions could help us determine how we can build a
democracy that supports and sustains the social, political, environmental, and
economic well-being of all citizens on the planet. Concepts such as oppres-
sion, marginalization, exploitation, and violence must be studied in the social
studies curriculum as a means by which to interrogate various interpretations
of citizenship and citizenship education, as well as a mechanism through
which we can uncover both oppressive and antioppressive possibilities—a
point of view that signals the limits, and even obsolescence, of a twentieth-
century Deweyan perspective toward citizenship and democracy.24
During the past 100 years, social studies has given a conceptual and moral
legitimacy to the values and ideals born in and embodied by the Industrial
Revolution. A social studies curriculum that teaches toward the future would
seriously question the historical imperatives that so often have ignored and
obliterated cultural traditions—ideas that once were essential to one’s sur-
vival in the industrial age. Competition, which breeds a lack of trust among
individuals, mixed with heavy doses of rugged individualism, have rendered
extinct forms of knowledge and networks of support that can provide healthy
and positive alternatives to our total reliance on capitalism.25 If social stud-
ies educators are to avoid becoming irrelevant in the contemporary world,
then they—we—must take efforts to move our curriculum from a history-
centered focus to an interdisciplinary, social studies focus. This, of course,
is easier said than done. It will not be easy to change 100 years of curricular
practice, nor will such change necessarily be widely embraced.
In the following sections, I briefly outline four issues that social studies
educators might address to help teach toward the future: (1) celebrating
curricular diversity in the social studies; (2) questioning the purpose of be-
ing nonpartisan, or neutral, as a social studies educator; (3) challenging the
existence of history-centered, chronologically based survey courses; and (4)
widening the modes of assessment of the socials studies curriculum. While,
overall, these are modest proposals, I hope that we, as social studies educa-
tors, will begin the debate as to how the social studies curriculum must
change to deal with the challenges of the twenty-first century.

CURRICULAR DIVERSITY IN THE SOCIAL STUDIES:
END THE DEBATE
Social studies educators need to spend the next decade discussing new
approaches for the social studies curriculum that could be introduced into
public school practice. If the turn of the twentieth century is any indication,
the decisions we make for social studies may result in setting a curricular
agenda for the remainder of the twenty-first century. But rather than trying
to install a specific agenda as we did in the industrial age, perhaps an even
more significant outcome from such a conversation is the idea that there may
be many ways to conceptualize the social studies curriculum, rather than a

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26 Defending Public Schools

singular set of state or national standards. Embracing true diversity regard-
ing what and how we teach via social studies must be a core value. Rather
than seeking the “best way” to teach social studies, we need to examine how
what and how we teach, are different, not simply (or inherently) better.
In our culture of debate, differences in and of opinion are largely
adversarial, a conflict among opposing camps. Debate implies arguing a po-
sition, attacking the opposition’s weak points. It promises a winner and a
loser. Rather than debate, it is time to have an open dialogue that transforms,
extends, and enriches the social studies curriculum. We need to learn from,
and not be defeated by, our differences. Rather than positioning ourselves
to preserve a particular vision of the, social studies curriculum, we need to
discuss things openly, to share and learn from our differences. It is time to
embrace the diversity in our field that we believe (or at least frequently claim
to believe) is essential to democratic society.

THE MYTH OF NEUTRALITY
For decades, there has been an underlying assumption that social studies
teachers should be politically neutral in the classroom. At first glance, the
assertion that teachers can and should remain neutral sounds reasonable,
logical, and necessary. Unfortunately, the notion of a teacher’s, or any
person’s, “neutrality” on a critical social issue is simply an impossible goal.
Anyone who has spent any time at all in a classroom observing student be-
havior clearly understands that students are able to pinpoint a teacher’s po-
litical and social beliefs in minutes—even when the teacher is striving to be
“objective” or “neutral.” Ask any student about his or her teacher’s politi-
cal beliefs and the student will recite them by chapter and verse. Political
beliefs are, all too often, the “unspoken” but highly visible subtexts of a
teacher’s classroom. These political subtexts encourage students who are
seeking to gain the teacher’s attention, praise, and high grades to engage in
a sophisticated “dance,” where they spend their time in the classroom fig-
uring out what ideas the teacher wants to hear and how best to repeat and
restate those ideas. Under the guise of being “neutral,” a teacher’s opinions
are seldom, if ever, questioned or thoroughly discussed; when they are, they
often are simply considered to be the source of last resort to be remembered
and regurgitated on the next examination. To deny that this exists in today’s
classrooms is putting one’s head into the sand.
An honest, open classroom discussion regarding controversial social issues
should involve many divergent points of view, interrogating both the
teacher’s and the students’ opinions. To cast issues simply as having only one
or two simplistic perspectives—often belonging to the teacher—is to encour-
age students to engage in reductionist, fragmented judgments that discour-
age critical thinking. Students need to be challenged to question the teacher’s
and their own points of view. In order to do this effectively, the teacher needs

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Old Wine in a New Bottle 27

to provide information that represents multiple points of view. More impor-
tant, when students seem to be set on a specific point of view, the teacher
needs to argue an opposing viewpoint—especially when the students’ view
supports a teacher’s known political beliefs.
Teachers should never insist that students repeat or blindly adopt the ideas
that they themselves believe; to do so would be to engage in antidemocratic
teaching techniques that dangerously threaten personal liberty and our demo-
cratic way of life. Teachers must encourage their students to question ideas
regardless of their origin. Simply stated, students who purport to think criti-
cally have a responsibility to become familiar with many points of view and
be able to vigorously argue ideas they do not support as if they were their
own.
It is essential to encourage discussion about “hot button” political issues
if the curriculum is to have any relevance for students. Schools exist to pro-
mote and support thoughtful citizens who practice critical thinking. In our
society, continuing the myth that teachers can, and should, remain neutral
in the classroom does not support the noble and important goal of teach-
ing for democracy.

SURVEY CLASSES: A MIND-NUMBING CURRICULUM
Much of the contemporary social studies curriculum is delivered in what
are referred to as “survey classes.” We have all experienced a world history
or American history class that is taught over the duration of a semester or
school year. Most would agree that it is difficult to teach the history of the
world or of America in one semester or academic year. Survey classes are a
very common way to organize the social studies curriculum. These classes
are designed and taught using a teacher-centered, chronological, textbook-
driven ordering of the curriculum. The dilemma with survey classes is that
there is an impossible amount of information “to be covered” given the time
period of the course. When taught using a chronological approach, much
of the information at the end of the class—the time period that is most re-
cent and is often closest to the learners—is not addressed or is quickly dis-
missed, further distancing the curriculum from the lives of the students.
From the point of view of learning theory, what commonly results in sur-
vey classes is a shallow, surface-feature approach to concept development.
Experiences in these classes are absent of a rich and deep set of experiences
or sustained study likely to instill an interest in the topics being discussed,
or a sense of moving from novice to experts as learners. These classes do not
ensure understanding and appreciation of the topics they focus on. More
significant, survey courses tend to remove social studies topics from their
intrinsically human character. There is a sameness to these courses and a
detachment from real people. In-depth inquiry is obliterated by a tidal wave
of mind-numbing facts, names, dates, and places.

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28 Defending Public Schools

Social studies curricula that are not based on this survey mentality could
have as their focus an interdisciplinary approach. Classes that might move
away from a survey-based structure would support decision making and form
a unified, interdisciplinary social studies curriculum. Instead of building so-
cial studies on the discipline of history, imagine semester-long social studies
courses titled War Through the Ages: Its Impact on Political and Social Thought
or From Greece to Gandhi: Democracy and Its Practice or Race, Power, and
American Society, Social Class, and Privilege or Ideology, Government, and
Economic Life or Bombs and Borders: Nationalism and International Rela-
tions or Philosophy and Ethics in Democratic Life or Media and You: On Be-
coming a Critical Citizen or Alternatives to Democracy: Utopian Visions or
Competing Ideologies? or Technology, Society, and the Environment or The
School: An Institution of Social Equality or an Instrument of Reproduction?
These classes provide (or could provide) an alternative to the History of the
United States 1865–2000, or History of the Ancient World or Western Civili-
zation.
A contemporary social studies curriculum that moves away from an in-
dustrial-age-survey approach structures knowledge as continuously re-cre-
ated, recycled, and shared by teachers and students. This curriculum
encourages students to view knowledge critically and helps them build on
their social knowledge and skills. Survey classes are irrelevant in today’s world.
Students need a social studies curriculum that can help them make sense of,
and provide connections with, their world. If students are to become citi-
zens of the world, then we must provide opportunities in the social studies
curriculum to question, make decisions about, and transform their world.

TOO MANY TESTS
Social studies as a field of learning is conducive to the development of
decision making and reasoning skills. Students learn such things as deriving
concepts from related events, testing new hypotheses based upon another
set of circumstances, exploring causal relationships, drawing conclusions from
an array of data, addressing and analyzing a divergent set of perspectives
related to an issue or issues, and asking questions about concerns of “fact.”
The assessments used in many social studies classrooms, however, reflect a
quite different set of learning priorities. Assessments rarely require skills other
than the recall and feedback of memorized information.
The preponderance of assessments in the social studies curriculum involve
listening, reading textbooks, completing workbooks and worksheets, and
taking written quizzes and examinations. Matching, multiple choice, fill-in-
the-blank, and true or false test items, mixed with the occasional essay or
short-answer question, are the dominant forms of assessment. Repetition and
forced memorization are the teacher’s “coins of the realm” for social stud-
ies curriculum and instruction. In such a curriculum, there is little time avail-

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Old Wine in a New Bottle 29

able for sharing ideas or for teachers and students learning from one another.
Tests here measure only a small sample of students’ intellectual abilities.
Creative and critical thinking is de-emphasized or eliminated from the cur-
riculum. Sitting for sometimes hours at a time while selecting recall-based
answers to the ticking of the clock is an assessment mode that has been with
us for hundreds of years. In this mode, students learn little about the con-
tent of the social studies curriculum, but they do learn other things.
These tests prepare students quite nicely for the world of work. By fixing
a specific time to complete a test and by promoting a “do or die” mentality,
tests in the social studies curriculum prepare students for the work situations
they will encounter later in life. Such forms of testing require responses that
have “correct” responses and are not open to question. More important, it
is the teacher—the “final authority” on these tests—who is teaching students
to assume that those in positions of authority know much more than they
do simply because of their position as an authoritarian figure.
Conventional tests are a recapitulation of behavioral objectives that actu-
ally grew out of the efficiency movement in education of the first third of
the twentieth century; they are based on an industrial model of high pro-
ductivity.26 The lessons that students learn from these tests support an in-
dustrial age ethic of work and submission to authority. The dominant image
for testing in social studies is based upon these timeworn industrial age prin-
ciples. Students passively listen to lectures, and they transfer facts from text-
books to worksheets. Students are methodically marched through time,
chapter by chapter, test by test. One hundred years of these assessments
demand that we look for alternatives.
Social studies assessments should serve to determine the success of a cur-
riculum, provide information to students, and inform teachers and parents
of children’s learning and achievements. It is time to focus on assessments
in social studies that

• are authentic in nature and designed to provide feedback that improves student
learning;
• involve students, parents, teachers, and the community collaborating for improved
student learning; and
• allow for a variety of measures that focus on individual student learning.

Assessments in the social studies should revolve around thematic ques-
tions that address how students apply information as well as the skills they
have learned to integrate their work. This cannot be done solely through
worksheets or multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank or essay tests. Assessments
can be created that allow students to show what they know. Teachers should
make sure students understand the assessment in advance, as opposed to tra-
ditional testing where students know little about the evaluation process.
Assessment should require students to think deeply about course content and

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30 Defending Public Schools

use higher level thinking skills such as application, analysis, and synthesis.
Such assessment encourages students to apply what they know through a
project, performance, or product. More important, students should assess
their own work in conjunction with the teacher’s assessment. We can see how
students are thinking and the knowledge they bring to a task by asking them
to describe what they have learned, write about the strongest and weakest
parts of their work, and choose criteria by which they will judge their work.
If the social studies curriculum is to promote critical thinking and decision
making, then the means of assessment we use must address critical thinking
and problem solving among students.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX
Similar to the beginning of the twentieth century, the advent of the
twenty-first century is characterized by rapid change in our society and a call
for serious educational reform. While many current social studies teachers
certainly do a remarkable and commendable job, we must remember that
the curriculum they work with was developed, essentially, over 100 years ago,
an age very different from today. It is time for social studies educators to
create a contemporary social studies curriculum that is relevant to our stu-
dents, meets the needs of our rapidly changing society, and prepares citizens
for their future involvement in democracy. Maintaining and sustaining a
twentieth-century history-centered curriculum does not, and can not, serve
our students in the twenty-first-century.
I hope that social studies educators spend the next decade discussing new
approaches for the social studies curriculum that could be introduced into
public school practice in the twenty-first century. What may emerge from
such a dialogue are many different ways to conceptualize the social studies
curriculum, rather than the singular set of state or national standards often
imposed. That, indeed, would be thinking outside the box at the beginning
of the twenty-first century.

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— 3 —

Literacy Research and Education
Reform: Sorting through the
History and the Myths
MARTHA RAPP RUDDELL

Popular and some professional opinions today hold that (1) literacy achieve-
ment in the United States has suffered an ongoing downward spiral since a
mythical golden period of high achievement, (2) the cause of this downward
trend was (or is) the widespread and thoughtlessly careless use of instruc-
tional practice not supported by research, and (3) the current “research-
based” instruction—of skills-first reading instruction with a heavy early
emphasis on phonemic awareness and training—is somehow new and is the
answer to all the literacy achievement “problems.” Indeed, the latest federal
education policy, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, not only
endorses such instruction but also mandates yearly standardized testing of
all children above second grade to “assure” that literacy skills have been
learned. Contrary to this view is the actual history of American literacy in-
struction that is marked by periods in which new concerns about our
children’s literacy arose, followed by research efforts and instructional re-
forms (often fashioned in response to popular or political pressure) that were
undertaken to counter these concerns, and resulting subsequent periods in
which yet other questions surfaced. The questions asked in these cycles of
periodic concern had direct influence on the research and instruction that
followed. Further, the fact of the existence of this cyclical pattern of reform
belies the notion that great waves of literacy instruction in this country were
atheoretical or lacking a research base. The fact is, we have an unbroken
history of well over 100 years of literacy research. That said, however,

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32 Defending Public Schools

research results have always been subject to various interpretations and trans-
formations into instructional practice. This chapter traces the development
of research and reform in American literacy instruction and highlights the
ways public and professional concern shaped research trends and instructional
practices. It provides an analysis of current reforms and the research base for
those reforms.

HOW DO WE READ?
Nila Banton Smith,1 in her landmark history of American reading instruc-
tion, identifies 1894 as the beginning of American reading research. In that
very earliest research, much attention was given to the question “How do
we read?” with significant amounts of the research focused on the physiol-
ogy of reading. Eye movement research between the late 1800s and continu-
ing well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries yielded information
about eye–voice span, saccadic movement—the movement of the eyes as they
scan across lines of print—reading rate, and differences in eye movement for
skilled and not-so-skilled readers, and for silent and oral reading.
Much of the effect of the eye movement research was the instructional
goal of fluency in both silent and oral reading, and a primary means for pro-
moting and assessing fluency was an instructional practice called round robin
oral reading. Round robin oral reading is the term used to identify the prac-
tice of having one child read orally while the others follow silently as that
child reads. The “round robin” part comes from the common practice of
students taking turns in oral reading around the room or around the read-
ing group. Although this practice was not new to reading instruction in the
United States during the early twentieth century, it nevertheless gained ad-
ditional legitimacy as a means for developing oral reading fluency; it remains
a common practice—sometimes called “popcorn reading”—to this day, not
only in elementary reading groups but in secondary content classrooms as
well.
Interestingly, as late as the 1940s and 1950s, researchers were still doing
significant amounts of research on eye movement. In 1940, Luther Gilbert2
studied skilled and less-skilled readers’ eye movements as they read silently
while another skilled or less-skilled reader read aloud in round robin oral
reading fashion. What he found is that skilled readers appeared to be annoyed
by the stops and starts of less-skilled readers and so simply read ahead or
stopped reading altogether; less-skilled readers were unable to keep up with
the flow of reading established by skilled readers and showed their frustra-
tion by discontinuing their attempts to read. In each case, the ultimate ef-
fect was what Harry Singer3 called “eyes straying toward the window.” Singer
reported Gilbert’s study as one that “should have made a difference [with
respect to instructional practice] and didn’t” because it had little effect on
the continuing use of round robin oral reading in classrooms and schools.

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Literacy Research and Educational Reform 33

WHEN IS THE BEST TIME FOR ONSET OF READING
INSTRUCTION?
The 1920s and 1930s ushered in an interest in issues of reading readi-
ness and the attending question “When is the best time for onset of formal
reading instruction?” This was brought about by what Dolores Durkin4 iden-
tifies as “the new interest during the 1920s and 1930s in the ‘scientific’
measurement of children’s behavior, including their achievement in school.”
(We seem to be replicating this interest today with the current focus on stan-
dardized testing.) Durkin calls the interest in measurement “almost a craze
to measure everything” stemming from the confluence of newly developed
IQ and achievement tests and a prevailing belief that first graders were hav-
ing difficulty learning to read because they were not “ready” when instruc-
tion began. Enter Mabel Morphett and Carleton Washburne.
In 1931, Morphett and Washburne5 published the results of a study they
conducted to answer the question “What is the appropriate age for onset of
formal reading instruction?” Conducted in Winnetka, Illinois, where Carleton
Washburne was superintendent of schools and Mabel Morphett was a gradu-
ate student at the nearby University of Chicago, their study measured
children’s Mental Age (MA)—one of the constructs in the early years of in-
telligence measurement—at the beginning of first grade and then measured
the children’s reading achievement at the end of first grade and correlated
the results. Their findings indicated that children reading successfully by the
end of first grade entered first grade with a mental age of 6.5 years. In in-
telligence measurement, the chronological age most likely to be associated
with an MA of 6.5 is 6.5; that is, most children have to be six-and-one-half
years in age to reach an MA of 6.5. So, a 6.5 chronological age was gener-
alized from the Winnetka study and became the standard age of entry into
first grade throughout this country. Never mind that Winnetka, Illinois, was
(and is) a community of generally high socioeconomic status, that the chil-
dren being tested were the sons and daughters of University of Chicago pro-
fessors, and that the school itself was using the “Winnetka Plan” for reading
instruction—an instructional approach designed specifically for its children
and not used anywhere else. The results of this study were nevertheless
applied to all children in the United States and became the rationale and
support for what Durkin calls the “doctrine of postponement” in which
children’s entry into first grade was delayed solely on the basis of age. This
research and its resulting instructional reform satisfied the tenor of the times
in which the public and policymakers alike demanded academic measures that
were precise and “objective.” Although rebutted and criticized by eminent
researchers and many studies both contemporary to the 1930s and subse-
quent to that time, the standard of six-and-one-half years of age for onset
of formal reading instruction (i.e., entry into first grade) continued for gen-
erations in this country; thus, the Morphett and Washburne study has been

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34 Defending Public Schools

described by some as “research that made a difference [in terms of instruc-
tional practice] and shouldn’t have.”
Interest in discovering the best time for the onset of formal reading in-
struction was but one part of the larger interest in reading readiness, that
point in time at which a child is “ready” to begin reading (or for formal read-
ing instruction to begin). One outgrowth of this interest was the widespread
development of readiness tests and readiness programs intended to prepare
children in kindergarten and early first grade for formal reading instruction.
Designed ideally to meet the needs of individual children (as Carleton
Washburne said, to make sure each child was “ripe” for instruction), read-
ing readiness programs in actuality were used in a generally lock-step man-
ner for all children in whatever period of late kindergarten or early first a
school or district deemed appropriate. Reading readiness programs held heavy
sway in early reading instruction for a long time (from the 1920s to the
1960s) in large part because of the equally stable adherence in this country,
in both popular and professional opinion, to views of human growth and
development that emphasized maturation (as opposed to social or other in-
fluences) as a major influence on cognitive growth and achievement.

WHY ARE OUR CHILDREN LEAVING SCHOOL
UNABLE TO READ?
Early in the 1940s, we recruited soldiers into the armed forces in unprec-
edented numbers, as they became sitting ducks not only for the war experi-
ence ahead of them but also for American testing experts. And test them we
did—we were not too choosy about human subjects review at that time. This
led to the rediscovery that thousands of soldiers could not read well enough
to do their work in the armed services (a discovery of earlier testing during
World War I). This rediscovery, in turn, led to the research question “Why
are our children leaving school unable to read?” This question coincided with
earlier concerns about children in first and other grades who were not learn-
ing to read to a level of success and also with the focus on remedial reading
that had begun in the 1930s; further, it served as a catalyst for interest in
middle-level and secondary reading. Research dwindled during World War
II, but the essential question of the 1940s segued into the 1950s as “Why
can’t our children read?” Rudolph Flesch had an answer: his widely known
and much quoted book, Why Johnny Can’t Read, published in 1955, in
which he excoriated public education and called into question the then-
current methods for beginning reading instruction—methods associated with
basal readers (the old Dick and Jane books) in which children learned words
in context first and later learned to analyze sound-symbol relationships.6
Shortly afterward, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, which caused
a national frenzy of criticism around the question of “Why can’t our chil-
dren read?” directed at American schools. The question really was, “Why are

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Literacy Research and Educational Reform 35

we behind the Russians?” Although huge research studies did not immedi-
ately surface, federal money did, and from it came the question “What is the
best method for beginning reading instruction?”
The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 was passed in di-
rect response to the combined events of the publication of Why Johnny Can’t
Read and the launching of Sputnik. This landmark legislation ushered fed-
eral funding (and attendant stipulations and controls) into local schools at
a level never before seen in the United States. This landmark legislation es-
tablished huge funds for development and implementation of Title I read-
ing programs. In addition, it provided equally large funding for basic and
applied reading research.
The United States Office of Education Cooperative Reading Studies,7
more commonly called “The First Grade Studies,” were launched in 1964,
funded by NDEA, to answer the question of what is the best method for
early reading instruction. These studies involved twenty-seven separate re-
search centers across the United States and were coordinated by Guy Bond
and Bob Dykstra at the University of Minnesota.
The goals of this research were twofold: first, to carry out a coordinated
large-scale research program to examine early reading instruction under con-
ditions that allowed the comparison of findings across multiple studies in a
wide variety of classrooms and schools and, second, to discover once and for
all the answer to the research question “What is the best method of begin-
ning reading instruction?” The methods being compared included (1) Basal
reading, in which children first learned words in a meaning-based context
and then analyzed those words to associate separate sound-symbol relation-
ships (the Dick and Jane books); (2) Phonetic emphasis, in which children
learned and practiced sound-symbol associations and then blended sounds
into meaningful words (phonics-first); (3) the Language Experience Ap-
proach, in which children read and reread their own dictated stories, and
developed word analysis skills from manipulation and analysis of words in
their dictated texts; (4) Individualized reading, in which children self-selected
books for reading instruction and teachers developed separate skill instruc-
tion as children’s needs indicated; (5) Linguistic emphasis, in which word
families were taught for use in decoding linguistically consistent text, such
as “Can Nan fan Dan?”; (6) the Initial Teaching Alphabet, or i/t/a, that
used an altered English-language alphabet to achieve a one-to-one sound-
symbol correspondence for beginning reading and then transitioned children
into reading conventional written English after they became fluent reading
i/t/a text (at about second or third grade); and (7) Audio-Visual Methods,
including instruction called “Words in Color” that used a color-coding sys-
tem to identify categories of words and to signal certain pronunciation con-
sistencies.
The approach of these coordinated studies was to identify and study class-
rooms in which one of the different methods of instruction was being used—

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36 Defending Public Schools

thus, each classroom in the study was dedicated to a specific instructional
method. All the studies were conducted in first grade classrooms during the
1964–1965 school year. Each study lasted the entire year, and all studies used
the same standardized tests to determine achievement at the end of the study
year. Thirty-three thousand children and hundreds of teachers and schools
participated in the First Grade Studies. Seven centers, each with studies in-
volving multiple classrooms and schools, extended their research through the
second and third grades in 1965–1966 and 1966–1967.
Many results came from these studies, and considerable opportunity for
exploring nuance is available in them. The major findings related to the
question “What’s the best method for beginning reading instruction?” were
as follows:

1. For every instructional method examined, many children were successful read-
ers by the end of first grade. And for every method examined, some children were
not successful readers at the end of first grade.
2. Those children in the synthetic phonics or phonics-first classes evidenced a slight
achievement advantage over children in the Basal reader and LanguageExperience
Approach and other approaches at the end of first grade. This advantage was
statistically significant but educationally small—an achievement difference of
about one month.
3. By the end of the third grade, differences between methods washed out; the one-
month “advantage” for phonics-first students had disappeared. The good read-
ers in each method were reading on a similar level, and the struggling readers in
each method were about the same distance behind.
4. Throughout the First Grade Studies, and even into the Second and Third Grades
Studies, greater differences were found between classrooms than between method.
That is, no matter what the method of instruction, children learned to read in
some classrooms and did not fare as well in others.

One of the greatest influences of the First Grade Studies (and other re-
search of this period as well as the social changes occurring in the 1960s)
was expansion of the methods and materials for formal reading instruction.
That is, the de-emphasis on method and the corresponding emphasis on
what is happening in the classroom as the defining characteristic of good
instruction led to practice in which methods were combined or trans-
formed; so, theoretically, teachers could use both heavy phonics drill and
Language Experience stories in any given classroom. In reality what hap-
pened was a great flurry of publication in which virtually every reading
program in the country was rewritten, expanded to include many differ-
ent kinds of instruction, and illustrated to reflect a changing society.
Teacher Guides in these new series were greatly expanded to give teachers
many suggestions and teaching activities from which they were to choose
in order to meet the needs of their own students. The goal was to make
the guides “teacher-proof” so that no matter what choices the teacher

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Literacy Research and Educational Reform 37

made, she or he would be using high-quality reading instruction practice.
In addition to the revisions of established basal reading series, many new
series debuted during this time; in almost all cases, reading anthologies in
the 1970s and beyond were expanded to include books for seventh and
eighth grades to meet the needs of newly developed programs of reading
instruction in middle and junior high schools.
What is significant but usually lost in discussions of the First Grade Studies
is that the results of these studies were absolutely counter to Rudolph Flesch’s
theory and criticism in Why Johnny Can’t Read that a specific method of
reading instruction was the reason for poor reading achievement. Method
proved not to be the differentiating factor in these studies, especially those
that followed students’ reading progress through the end of grade three.
These research results did not, however, change prevailing popular belief.

HOW DO THE MANY ELEMENTS OF READING PRO-
CESSES WORK TOGETHER?
The early 1970s saw a new research emphasis stimulated by the question
“How do the many elements of the reading process work together?” This
new question acknowledged the complexities of the reading process beyond
the questions we asked over fifty years previously that focused on just eye
movement and the like. Toward the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s,
due in large part to the work of the new Center for the Study of Reading
headed by Richard Anderson at the University of Illinois, came the rise in
prominence of the element of prior knowledge in the reading process and
the subsequent generation of a wealth of research at the center and elsewhere
on Schema Theory, a theory that changed virtually everyone’s view of the
reading process. Emerging also during this time was study in discourse analy-
sis that parsed the elements of “story.” Instructional reform did not grow
immediately from these lines of research, but the end result was to break the
hold that maturational theory had on our thinking about cognitive growth
and development. From this work, we began to see the influence of prior
knowledge, world knowledge, social interactions, and many other factors on
humans’ constructions of meaning and cognitive growth.
The early 1970s also saw the beginnings of national testing to measure
progress in reading (and math and science) that continues today as the Na-
tional Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, reading tests. Inter-
estingly, for over thirty years, the results of this testing have refuted charges
of precipitous drops in reading ability in the United States (see Figure 3.1).8
In fact, the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) says of these
results that nine-, thirteen-, and seventeen-year-olds’ scores were higher in
1999 than in 1971. Although the differences are small, they are statistically
significantly. The most recent NAEP scores, 2002 and 2003 testing reading
in urban schools, are remarkably similar to the 1999 averages.

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38 Defending Public Schools

Figure 3.1 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Trends, 1971–
1999.

As with the results of the First Grade Studies, the results of this longitu-
dinal research are rarely considered in the cyclical public cries of “The scores
are falling! The scores are falling!” by editorial writers on a slow news day
and by politicians looking for a headline. These are not hidden results; they
are reported on the NCES website that is open for public access. The scores
are not falling, and we have thirty years of evidence to confirm that.

HOW DO CHILDREN BECOME LITERATE?
In the 1980s, new questions emerged. In their longitudinal study that
resulted in the book Language Stories and Literacy Lessons,9 Jerry Harste,
Virginia Woodward, and Carolyn Burke changed the old question of “When
is the best time for the onset of formal reading instruction?” to “How do
children become literate?” and “What do children’s preliterate behaviors
reveal about their literacy knowledge before the onset of reading instruc-
tion?” They found that what we used to call “scribbling” is preliterate writ-
ing, which children can read after they have written it, which is systematic
and representative of the writing found in children’s environments. They
found that very young children know the difference between when they are
creating art and when they are writing, and understand and use a variety of
print functions in their environments. In other words, children produce dif-
ferent forms of writing based on function: lists look like lists, stories look
like stories, and party invitations look like party invitations. In short, in Jerry
Harste’s words, they found that “Children know more than we ever dared
imagine.” Elizabeth Sulzby10 asked a similar question in her seminal 1985
study of preschool children’s oral reading of favorite storybooks and in her
many subsequent follow-up studies. She discovered that very young children
who have not yet been exposed to formal reading instruction develop a
“linguistic repertoire” of things to do to manage text and to support their
early oral reading experiences.

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Literacy Research and Educational Reform 39

Anchored by the early LanguageExperience and Individualized Reading
approaches (recall the methods studied in the First Grade Studies), the Whole
Language approach to reading instruction was the reform that grew from
the understandings developed by observational research conducted in school
and preschool settings over long periods of time in which children engaged
individually and collectively in literate behaviors. The following understand-
ings form the foundation of the whole language approach:

1. Children are active participants in their own language and literacy development;
they build theories and test hypotheses as they construct meaning about their
world.
2. Children’s perceptions of print and their productions of oral and written language
follow rule-governed, coherent behavior that reflects their current understand-
ing of how print and language work.
3. Children enter school with a high degree of language competence; their read-
ing and writing development progress throughout the elementary grades in a par-
allel and interactive manner.
4. Children’s reading and writing acquisition are influenced by their language and
world knowledge, social interactions, and literacy environments, including avail-
able language models (family, teacher, peer group), language and literacy rou-
tines, and opportunities to use language in meaningful interactions.
5. Children’s home and community language and literacy environments, inter-
actions, and routines strongly influence their reading and writing develop-
ment; close home-school linkage is important to their language and literacy
growth.

Whole language instruction was never considered a “method” of teach-
ing; rather, it was and is built on classrooms in which “rich, authentic,
developmentally appropriate school experiences” 11 are created by the
teacher to extend students’ literacy. The teacher is expected to have deep
understandings of child and literacy development in order to be able to
make decisions about the kinds of experiences that are appropriate for
each child.
In many states, whole language instruction took the form of literature-
based instruction in which educators moved away from using basal reader
stories excerpted from books and taught with the actual literature itself.
Unfortunately, along with new policies (in some cases, state policies) that
focused on whole language or literature-based instruction came little if any
professional development resources to assist teachers in changing their prac-
tice. In the end, many teachers and schools simply basalized the literature;
for example, they taught The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe using the
same instructional strategies they had used when teaching Dick and Jane
readers. On the other hand, many other teachers and schools created rich,
vibrant literacy learning environments and opportunities for young children,
in which children thrived.

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40 Defending Public Schools

Whole Language instruction was not, and is not, a fad. It is an approach
to literacy instruction that capitalizes on children’s natural affinity for lan-
guage and literacy learning. And it is supported by a substantial body of re-
search in which researchers spent days and weeks and years in classrooms and
schools observing, recording, and analyzing young children’s development
toward fluent literacy (as opposed to running into the room, administering
a test, and running back out again). The NAEP data attest to the fact that
the great “drop” in reading scores attributed to whole language instruction
in the 1980s and 1990s simply did not occur.

HOW DO LITERACY PROCESSES WORK?
In the early 1990s, our attention turned from the individual processing
of text and “reading” per se to look at group and social negotiations of text,
and the broadening of our lens to “literacy” research. Our question became
“What is the nature of the interactions and transactions that comprise lit-
eracy processes?” Further, interest in such constructs as the intertext,
transmediation, and activity theory guided much of our research, as well as
renewed interest in the learning process for second language learners. As
Patricia Alexander12 states:

Interest shifted from describing the knowledge of the one to the shared un-
derstanding of the many and from discerning the fundamental laws of learn-
ing to capture the unique “ways of knowing” for particular social, cultural, and
educational groups. . . . Thus, the predominant metaphor of the [1990s] be-
came one of literacy as a sociocultural, collaborative experience. This metaphor
was mirrored in the widespread popularity of such concepts as cognitive ap-
prenticeship, shared cognition, and social constructivism.

This sea change in our research agenda that evolved over many years was
characterized in 1994 by David Pearson and Diane Stephens13:

[W]hat we know about reading, how we think about reading, even what we
call “reading” has changed considerably over the last thirty years. Reading, once
the sole domain of educators, has become transdisciplinary. The knowledge base
that has grown out of the once separate fields of psychology, sociology, lin-
guistics, and literary theory has been created by and/or shared with educators.
Indeed, many individuals now identify themselves as educators and as cogni-
tive psychologists, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, literary theorists, and even
sociopsycholinguists.

As the research has expanded to include many perspectives and voices,
so too has instruction. Constructivist thought and teaching have grown di-
rectly from this base; in addition, whole language instruction has strength-
ened.

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Literacy Research and Educational Reform 41

WHAT CONSTITUTES GOOD LITERACY RESEARCH?
In the late 1990s, and continuing on today, external forces—policymakers,
politicians, and state and federal departments of education—began exerting
new pressures on the literacy research community. The question they imposed
was “What constitutes good literacy research?” Laws were passed defining
“acceptable” research as typified in California by Assembly Bill 1086, which
declared only the narrowly defined “confirmed research” to be acceptable
for informing educational practice (a definition that has now been incorpo-
rated into federal educational policy). A certain few studies were used as the
sole basis for the revised California reading and language arts instructional
framework, some of which raise questions regarding validity, reliability, and
generalizability not unlike the questions raised—but never resolved—regard-
ing the Morphett and Washburne study. The National Reading Panel
(NRP)14—commissioned by the National Institute of Child Health and
Development with members selected to represent a bias toward experimen-
tal research—conducted its review of literacy research for purposes which I
described15 four years ago as “judging certain research to be good or bad,
worthy or unworthy; certain theoretical stances and research methodologies
to be acceptable or unacceptable; and certain research studies to be repre-
sentative of all that we know about literacy learning and instruction.” The
panel’s choice of studies to include in their review was narrow indeed, lim-
ited to the analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental reading research
conducted since 1990 and seemingly uninformed by studies that reflect the
realities of classroom life or studies conducted any time in the almost 100
years of reading research before 1990. Not surprisingly, all observational
studies, such as the Harste, Woodward, and Burke seven-year observation
of young children developing toward literacy and Elizabeth Sulsby’s many
replications of her original research on emergent literacy, were not consid-
ered. Nor were the First Grade Studies. Nevertheless, the NRP report was
widely disseminated and discussed, and in some instances considered to be
The Final Answer. The report’s primary finding was that effective reading
instruction begins with systematic phonics instruction. As one might expect,
reactions to the report were (and are) many and today are generally critical
of the narrow scope of the research reviewed by the panel to arrive at policy
conclusions. Jim Cunningham’s review in Reading Research Quarterly16 was
particularly detailed. As Cunningham states:

Most readers of the NRP Report will probably find themselves agreeing with
at least one of the findings. Perhaps a majority of readers will agree with a
majority of the findings. However, the test of quality for scientific research is
whether knowledgeable and fair-minded skeptics find it persuasive. All research
is persuasive to those who already agree with it. No research is persuasive to
the person with a closed mind on a subject. The best science has the power to
change the thinking of those who previously disagreed with its conclusions but

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42 Defending Public Schools

who are fair-minded enough to admit they were wrong once the case has been
made. Who is a fair-minded skeptic? Anyone who can point to several impor-
tant issues in the past on which she or he has changed her or his mind because
of research results. . . . How likely is that to happen? I predict that the knowl-
edgeable and fair-minded skeptics who change their minds based on the NRP’s
findings will be few and far between. Too much professional and historical
knowledge about teaching reading is ignored, too little common sense is
brought to bear, and too little reading research is considered worthy of con-
sultation.

The instructional reform growing from the NRP report was immediate
and direct. Once again, reading series were rewritten on a wholesale scale,
this time for the purpose of narrowing teacher options for beginning read-
ing instruction simply to early, heavy, systematic instruction in phonemic
analysis and phonics that leads to the beginning reading of “predictable text.”
The “predictable text” of these new instructional materials, however, is not
the predictable text of the whole language classroom that encourages chil-
dren to chant along with patterned text, like Bill Martin’s Brown Bear, Brown
Bear (“Brown Bear, Brown Bear what do you see? I see a red bird looking
at me. Red Bird, Red Bird, what do you see?”); rather, it is the predictable
text of the old linguistic readers (“Dad had a sad lad.”). All of this early in-
struction is heavily scripted so that teachers read verbatim from the
Instructor’s Manual and children respond to the scripted prompts. Local,
state, and national policymakers accepted the NRP findings and began man-
dating use of the new instructional materials.
And now, in a reanalysis of the exact studies examined by the NRP, Gre-
gory Camilli, Sadako Vargas, and Michele Yurecko17 of the National Insti-
tute for Early Education Research have found that the conclusion arrived at
by the NRP of early systematic phonics instruction is not supported by the
data in those studies. Instead, in their reanalysis, they found that the NRP
ignored the fact that in the studies they cited to support systematic phon-
ics, over 30 percent included language activities as well, so “the NRP ana-
lysts missed the language effect for one simple reason: they didn’t look for
it.”18 They conclude that “Systematic phonics instruction when combined
with language activities and individual tutoring may triple the effect of phon-
ics alone [emphasis theirs].”19They continue, “If the NRP results are taken
to mean that effective instruction in reading should focus on phonics to the
exclusion of other curricular activities, instructional policies are likely to be
misdirected.”20 And misdirected they are. In many classrooms and schools
today, the heavy emphasis on scripted phonics instruction and drill leaves little
if any time for language activities and the reading of authentic text. This point
was made poignantly clear to me in an e-mail conversation with a young
fourth-grade teacher I had taught. She e-mailed me about her excitement
over the Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy (VSS)21 I had taught her for
increasing children’s vocabulary knowledge. She wrote,

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Literacy Research and Educational Reform 43

The resulting program was an even greater success than I could have ever
dreamed! I called my program W.O.W—Words on Wednesdays—and the
students and parents absolutely fell in love with it. The words that became
regular parts of the students’ speaking and writing vocabulary were aston-
ishing!
We did 10 words each week (everyone submitted, me included, and then
we eliminated down to 10) and ended up with over 200 words. The stu-
dents averaged A’s each week on quizzes and even at the end of the year,
on a cumulative test of about 100 words, I had MOST of the students get
100 percent. The words had become that much a part of their working vo-
cabulary. I could go on and on.
I just wanted to thank you for introducing me to VSS and let you know
how successful it made my students and me feel.
I answered her e-mail and said how pleased I was that VSS had been so
successful and accepted her offer to share the data with me. She responded,
I only have information from last year, as I haven’t been able to do WOW
this year (we have a district mandate to do the [Name] reading program and
I haven’t had the freedom to do WOW).

WHERE ARE WE NOW?
And so, the historical journey ends, and at its end, the questions is:
“Where are we now?” Overall, the results are mixed. On the one hand, most
notably because so many politicians and policymakers are unaware of our
research history, we are reliving our past without even knowing it. The in-
sistence by some, both within and outside the educational community, that
instructional method determines the quality of reading instruction ignores the
lesson learned in the First Grade Studies, and that lesson is that the ques-
tion “What is the best method of beginning reading instruction?” is not a
useful one to ask. The unfortunate result is that attention to method ulti-
mately draws attention away from the variables that did (and still do) affect
reading achievement in the First Grade Studies: classrooms and teachers and
schools. In 1967, Guy Bond and Bob Dykstra21 stated emphatically,

Future research should center on teacher and learning situation characteristics
[emphasis mine] rather than method and materials. The tremendous range of
classrooms within any given method points out the importance of elements in
the learning situation over and above the materials employed.

Additionally, to the extent that the NRP report reduces our conversation
to a method-against-method debate, we leave out of the conversation what
we have learned from the locus of research since the 1970s: Literacy is a
complex cognitive process and we cannot consider “reading” without also
considering issues of schema development, transactions between reader and

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44 Defending Public Schools

text, and the myriad social elements of literacy development and learning.
Further, by selectively ignoring the full range of our research knowledge,
policymakers, on the basis of a single test’s results, are postponing children’s
entry into school, retaining children in K–1 classes, or creating half-grades
to postpone entry into the next grade level because of low reading (or readi-
ness) scores. Thus, they reenact the practices of the 1920s and 1930s that
were ultimately abandoned due to the lack of evidence attesting to their ef-
fectiveness culled from either research or practice. In fact, the evidence we
have about retention in school is overwhelmingly clear: Retention rarely, if
ever, is effective in increasing students’ reading, or any other, achievement
in school.
And finally, by eliminating from our consideration research that is obser-
vational and qualitative, proponents of the “scientific” or “confirmed” re-
search bias systematically reduce the knowledge gleaned from close
observation and long-term study of children’s literate behavior, and reduce
further our ability to learn from children what they tell us everyday about
their individual and collective literacy development. It is time to move from
a position of narrow positivism to one of critical inquiry and analysis of both
the ongoing scholarly research of many research traditions and the daily
events in classrooms and schools—all of which must be leavened by our
knowledge of the historical context of research and practice.
We need to examine closely the reforms we implement in the name of
research. Far too many reforms are based on faulty assumptions or are hast-
ily imposed “new” methods that recapitulate old practices or that are con-
trary to the research evidence we have. The evidence we have is that reading
achievement has held steady for nine-, thirteen-, and seventeen-year-old stu-
dents in this country for well over thirty years; great, sweeping “reforms”
have had little effect. It appears that our children are resilient indeed; no
matter what we do to them in the name of beginning reading instruction,
they continue to learn to read. (I am not ignoring here the many children
who do not learn to read successfully and spend all their years in school strug-
gling; they are there and they are there in greater numbers than any of us
want. The fact is, however, that in a world that is vastly more complex than
it was thirty years ago, and in which classrooms and schools are vastly more
diverse than they were thirty years ago, reading scores, on average, are slightly
higher than they were thirty years ago.) The evidence we have also is that
no one method of reading instruction works for all children; it is vitally critical
that policy mandates, not confines, teachers to one “right” way to teach read-
ing. Just as we should assume a stance of critical inquiry and analysis of re-
search, so should we assume such a stance in developing instructional reform.
On the other hand, there is hope. For, in the end, today’s schools are filled
with dedicated and hardworking teachers, often performing astoundingly well
under more than trying circumstances. We have learned an enormous amount
about language and literacy in the past 100 years, and in the past twenty

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Literacy Research and Educational Reform 45

years, much of that knowledge is in the area of second language learning
and literacy; we have achieved a rich understanding of the complex processes
and transactions that comprise literate acts. And while we have not always
translated our research knowledge into perfect educational practice, we con-
tinue to try. In sorting through the history and the myths, then, what we
can say is that (1) literacy achievement in the United States has not suffered
an ongoing downward spiral since some mythical golden period of high
achievement; (2) considerable and substantive research has been generated
over the past 100 years to inform literacy instruction; and (3) research has
not always been understood or attended to by policymakers and those who
determine state and national educational law. The current tensions between
opposing views of what constitutes good research and practice are pushing
us all to think deeply and continue our efforts to ask new questions and to
seek answers in many and varied ways.

Ch3_31-46.pmd 45 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Ch3_31-46.pmd 46 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

— 4 —

The Mathematics Curriculum:
Prosecution, Defense, Verdict
CYNTHIA O. ANHALT, ROBIN A. WARD,
AND KEVIN D. VINSON

With the possible exception of reading and language arts, no subject area
enjoys as much, and as widespread, approval for inclusion in the school
curriculum as does mathematics. Whether viewed as one of “the basics”
(i.e., one of the “3 Rs”), problem solving, skill acquisition, intellectual/
applied process, or the learning of specific content knowledge, mathemat-
ics maintains support from across the pedagogical and ideological spec-
trum—from essentialists to progressives, from traditionalists to radical
educational critics. And yet, simultaneously, it is a discipline that faces
frequent, sustained, and extensive challenges, both warranted and un-
warranted. In this chapter, we raise and pursue the following questions:
Historically, what have been the places and purposes of mathematics edu-
cation? What is the current “state of the field” (e.g., best practice, stan-
dards, competing dominant views, and so on)? To what extent, and on
what bases, is mathematics education currently under attack? What is
exemplary about contemporary mathematics education? and, Where do
we go from here? We conclude by reconsidering both the positive and
negative aspects of contemporary mathematics education, coming down,
in the end, on the side that says that what we—mathematics educators,
generally—do is good and deserves to be defended vis-à-vis the often
underrated status, standing, position, and development of the school
curriculum and, more broadly, of American public education.

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48 Defending Public Schools

THE STATE OF CONTEMPORARY MATHEMATICS
EDUCATION
Mathematics has always played a significant role in the curriculum of
American schools. From the beginning, its status as one of the 3Rs—“read-
ing, ’riting, and ’rithmetic”—has largely gone unchallenged, and rightly so.
In the beginning, of course, the greatest emphasis was on simple “figuring”—
memorizing math facts, calculating, and so on—especially given that most
students did not come close to high school graduation, let along seek
postsecondary graduation or employment in the technical or scientific pro-
fessions (e.g., navigation, engineering, and other sciences).1 In short, the
early mathematics curriculum prepared workers to become farmers, shop-
keepers, and factory workers. Today’s workplace necessitates that the math-
ematics curriculum exceed proficiency with basic computational skills.
The mathematics curriculum pendulum is in constant motion. The be-
ginning of the reform movement in mathematics education occurred dur-
ing the first two decades of the 1900s, as pressures to provide an education
for all students mounted due to the growth in school enrollments as well as
the emerging research in theories of learning. Prior to this, nineteenth-cen-
tury mathematics was characterized by long practice, often with involved
problems. Educators and mathematicians were now advocating an integra-
tion of content and a shift to newer methods using concrete, developmen-
tal, and intuitive approaches.2 Arithmetic, once a college and secondary
school subject, was moved into the elementary school. The Report of the
Committee of Fifteen on Elementary Education dictated that grades two
through six focus on basic arithmetic; in grades seven and eight, the notion
of number would continue and some algebra would be introduced.3 At the
secondary level, The Reorganization of Mathematics in Secondary Education
called for a reduction in elaborate manipulations in algebra and less memo-
rization of theorems and proofs in geometry.4 This document also advocated
for a general mathematics program that included topics from arithmetic, al-
gebra, intuitive geometry, numerical trigonometry, graphs, and descriptive
statistics.5
From the 1920s through the 1940s the number and percentage of stu-
dents attending school continued to increase dramatically and, consequently,
the role of mathematics and how to teach it effectively were heavily scruti-
nized. Drill techniques, justified by such psychologists as Edward L.
Thorndike, were utilized heavily in the elementary schools to teach arith-
metic and algebra. Later in this period, however, two new theories of arith-
metic instruction strongly influenced mathematics teaching and textbooks,
namely William Brownell’s meaning theory and the readiness theory, attrib-
uted to the work of Gessell and other child development psychologists.6 The
impact of these theories on the mathematics curriculum resulted in the 1945
publication of the Second Report of the Commission on Past-War Plans, in

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The Mathematics Curriculum 49

which the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) suggested,
among other things, that drill and repetitive practices be administered much
more wisely and that more emphasis and careful attention be paid to the
development of meanings as well as students’ readiness for learning math-
ematical ideas.7
During the 1950s, the launching of Sputnik by the Soviets served as a
catalyst for the United States to rethink and revise the current mathematics
curriculum yet again. Another catalyst was the developing awareness of in-
equities, both gender and racial, in mathematics classrooms. “New math”
was born in 1951 and one of the most influential of the new math projects
was the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG). Public controversy sur-
rounding this curriculum began almost immediately with critics claiming it
was too abstract, disconnected from the real world, and used language un-
familiar even to mathematicians.8 Most significant in this new math era,
however, was the birth of numerous institutes deigned to improve the prepa-
ration of teachers of mathematics.
During the 1960s, which is sometimes referred to as the “modern math
era,” the mathematics curriculum reverted to more traditional, pedagogical
approaches, as mathematicians espoused that rigor and precision would re-
sult in deeper mathematical understanding.9 By the late 1960s the math
curriculum which was once characterized by the rote learning of facts and
algorithms, transitioned into one with a more conceptual, hands-on approach
to learning.
“Laboratory mathematics” marked the beginning of the 1970s as
manipulatives and other hands-on materials were introduced into the teach-
ing and learning of mathematics.10 At the close of the 1970s, however, a
back-to-basics approach resurfaced. It was during this time that the debate
over what topics and skills should be taught as part of the mathematics cur-
riculum became widespread and rather fevered. Most educators agreed that
not only was equal access by all citizens in the United States to mathemat-
ics a critical issue that needed addressing, but it was evident that society’s
technological advances were rendering some basic mathematics skills obso-
lete.
In the early 1980s the publication, An Agenda for Action advocated that
problem-solving take the forefront in the mathematics curriculum.11 This
document propelled the birth of other publications including Everybody
Counts and Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics
which specified the “essential” ingredients of the K-12 mathematics curricu-
lum and also explored how students learn mathematics.12 Thus, the late
1980s became known as the “era of realization.”13
In the mid-1990s it became evident that members of the education com-
munity misinterpreted the sprit of NCTM Standards, thinking that the
majority of traditional, basic mathematical skills be eliminated from the cur-
riculum and that schools focus solely on problem-solving and developing

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50 Defending Public Schools

higher-order thinking skills. Thus, members of the NCTM convened and
revised a new set of consolidated standards, namely the Principles and Stan-
dards for School Mathematics.14 These updated standards provided a clearer
vision of the essential ingredients of today’s mathematics curriculum, clari-
fying NCTM’s position on the need for both traditional, basic skills as well
as higher-order thinking skills, while also identifying the importance of eq-
uity, technology, and assessment in mathematics.
One trend that has gained momentum since the last decade of the twen-
tieth century is the movement by state and local communities to adopt their
own standards. Although most of these efforts were largely influenced by
the NCTM Standards, one unfortunate consequence has been that some
states publish their guidelines only months before decisions are made in the
textbook adoption process. Consequently, textbooks may be selected for
classroom use that superficially meet state guidelines but lack field-testing
and innovation.15
Clearly, over the last century, mathematics education has undergone sub-
stantial changes but, at times, the arguments and practices of today echo
those of the past. Slow, but noticeable progress has been made toward greater
equity, national standards, and higher expectations of teachers and students
while some changes, in particular those relative to technology, have been
abrupt but continue to evolve.16 Undoubtedly, athematics and conceptions
of and aims for mathematics education are infinitely more complex and var-
ied today than during the early history of American schooling. Our goal in
this section is to articulate the current status of preK–12 mathematics edu-
cation in the United States.
Here, we follow primarily the work of the National Research Council
(NRC). In Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics, the NRC
focuses on several critical indicators, most importantly “learning goals,” “in-
structional programs and materials,” “assessments,” “teaching,” and
“achievement.”17 The NRC offers the following conclusions:

• With respect to learning goals: “We see the efforts made since 1989 to develop
standards for teaching and learning mathematics as worthwhile. Many schools have
been led to rethink their mathematics programs, and many teachers to reflect on
their practice. Nonetheless, the fragmentation of these standards, their multiple
sources, and the limited conceptual frameworks on which they rest have not re-
sulted in a coherent, well-articulated, widely accepted set of learning goals for
U.S. school mathematics that would detail what students at each grade should
know and be able to do.”18
• With respect to instructional programs and materials: “The methods used in the
United States in the twentieth century for producing school mathematics text-
books and for choosing which textbooks and other materials to use are not suf-
ficient for the goals of the twenty-first century. The nation must develop a greater
capacity for producing high-quality materials and for using effectively those that
are produced.”19

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The Mathematics Curriculum 51

• With respect to assessments: “The current national focus on standards-based test-
ing is a definite improvement on the past focus on comparison testing. But stan-
dards-based assessment needs to be accompanied by a clear set of grade-level goals
so that teachers, parents, and the whole community can work together to help
all children in a school achieve these goals. . . . Continuing informal assessments
throughout the year can help teachers adjust their teaching and identify students
who need additional help. More such help might be available if money formerly
spent on comparison testing were reallocated to help children learn.”20
• With respect to teaching: “There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that
states and local districts ‘interested in improving student achievement may be well-
advised to attend, at least in part, to the preparation and qualifications of the
teachers they hire and retain in the profession. . . .’ [The] NAEP identified the
percentage of teachers with full certification and a major in the field they teach
as a strong and consistent predictor of student achievement in mathematics, con-
siderably stronger than such factors as class sizes, pupil-teacher ratios, state per-
pupil spending, or teachers’ salaries. This link between teacher qualification and
student achievement raises the question of how good that achievement is.”21
• With respect to achievement: “[M]any U.S. students are not being given the edu-
cational opportunities they need to achieve at high levels.”22

What Adding It Up suggests is a state of affairs in which mathematics
education is bothgood and bad, positive and negative. Although some things
are working well, others need improvement. Significantly, the NRC contends
that the causes in both directions are multiple—purpose, content, method,
assessment, money, policy, and so on. The NRC shares the wealth and spreads
the blame, a position with which we agree and with which we totally con-
cur. For instance, we accept that mathematics education should be goal-
driven—that purpose ought to influence (at least) classroom life, especially
via the curriculum—but question, to some extent, that standards-based teach-
ing should, finally, predominate.

THE CRITICISM
Criticism of contemporary mathematics education in the United States
tends toward a few principal and repetitive points. Overall, it emphasizes
certain beliefs organized around and stemming from the notion that, in one
way or another, American students (1) do not know enough and (2) cannot
do enough. As with other modes of recent school criticism, much of this
effort builds on concerns initially expressed in A Nation At Risk, and draws
upon conservative commentators (e.g., E. D. Hirsch, Jr.), professional aca-
demics (e.g., mathematics professors), and a range of corporate and govern-
ment leaders.23
The possibility that students in the United States neither know nor can
do enough mathematics generally originates via one of two dominant per-
spectives. Some critics insist that the problem involves too little focus on

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52 Defending Public Schools

traditional fact-based content (e.g., memorizing multiplication tables) and
the memorization of algorithmic procedures and formulas (e.g., the “old-
fashioned” steps “inherent” in long division). Stills others make the claim
of ineffectiveness based upon either (a) national achievement studies (e.g.,
the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]—“the nation’s
report card”) or (b) international comparison tests (e.g., the Third Interna-
tional Mathematics and Science Study [TIMSS]). Still others, though, in-
sist that math-based curriculum and instruction is too traditional. In many
cases, from our own viewpoint, these criticisms represent a too cozy rela-
tionship among academic content, elitist notions of economic competition,
and cultural conservatism, each of which, we maintain, threatens innovation
and improvement in mathematics education as well as current goals associ-
ated with “deep understanding” and individual and cultural diversity. In that
these have been recently unduly influential, we address No Child Left Be-
hind (NCLB) and standards-based educational reform (SBER) in the follow-
ing section.24

NCLB AND SBER
The NCLB Act of 2001 implies that, left to their own devices, teachers
and students (as well as those involved with helping and working with them)
will mess up—that is, by themselves, they cannot be counted on to imple-
ment effectively a significant and rigorous system of curriculum and instruc-
tion. Moreover, according to the national government—especially the White
House of President George W. Bush and the Department of Education un-
der Secretary Rod Paige—not even states and local districts can be counted
on to produce and actualize an appropriate system of public schooling. Thus,
a particular, singular, and disciplinary system must be put into place and
enforced. The idea, apparently, is that good education requires distrusting
teachers and students.
As such, the major principles of NCLB are:

• Increased accountability;
• More choices for parents and students;
• Greater flexibility for states, school districts, and schools; and
• Putting reading first (though, of course, there are other provisions as well).25

What these components imply is that teachers and students will not—or can-
not—be relied on to do quality work unless made to by some higher and
overriding authority. The understanding seems to hold some high-stakes
consequence—being left back in grade, firing, withholding funds, and so
on—over teachers and students, or they will not teach and learn “real” and
“important” mathematics.

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The Mathematics Curriculum 53

More specifically, the government recently has expanded upon NCLB to
explicate how it can “help” to improve mathematics achievement.26 As the
administration suggests:

The Challenge: America’s schools are not producing the math excellence required
for global economic leadership and homeland security in the twenty-first century.
The Solution: Ensure schools use scientifically based methods with long-term records
of success to teach math and measure student progress. Establish partnerships with
universities to ensure that knowledgeable teachers deliver the best instruction in
their field.27

The assumptions here are remarkable. The first, of course, is that teach-
ers, students, and schools seek—amazingly—to use something less than the
best methods of mathematics education. The second is that the purposes of
preK–PhD mathematics education are “global economic leadership” and
“homeland security. Perhaps our students be learning and understanding
mathematics for other reasons, too?.
Overall, what NCLB (and, to some extent, more contextualized modes
of SBER) signifies is that the federal government apparently knows more
about math education than do professional math educators. Perhaps. But,
in terms of defending public schools, we continue to put our faith in edu-
cators and math professionals ahead of our faith in the federal govern-
ment.
More specifically, and perhaps not unexpectedly, the administration argues
that NCLB distinctly improves—as long as math teachers conform—math-
ematics education. As the White House (and its policyadvisors) ask “How
can [and why should] No Child Left Behind help improve math achieve-
ment?” The answer?

• Math is a critical skill in the information age. We must improve achievement to
maintain our economic leadership;
• Math achievement is improving slightly, but much more work must be done to
ensure that our children receive a sound background in mathematics;
• No Child Left Behind creates Math and Science Partnerships to rally every sec-
tor of society to work with schools to increase math and science excellence;
• The president has called for increasing the ranks and pay of teachers of math and
science; [and]
• Our nation must research the best way to teach math and science and measure
students’ progress in math.28

On the other hand, there is no clear indication that this means math educa-
tion improves (or will improve—or even can improve) under NCLB. Still,
if nothing else, at least the national government takes (or claims to take)
mathematics education seriously.

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54 Defending Public Schools

Even more precisely, the administration claims the following statements
(both hopeful and critical) to be true:

• While technology advances with lightning speed, stagnant math performance in
schools shortchanges our students’ future and endangers our prosperity and our
nation’s security;
• According to the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP),
the average math scores of fourth- and eighth-graders, and twelfth-graders have
improved only slightly;
• . . . [O]nly a quarter of our fourth- and eighth-graders are performing at or above
proficient levels in math. Twelfth-grade math scores have not improved since
1996, and a closer look at those scores reveals that the biggest drop occurred at
the lowest levels of achievement. These are the students who most need our help
and who can least afford to lose any more ground;
• The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education will
provide an estimated $1 billion over five years for results-oriented partnerships
between local districts and universities to bring urgency, tested methods, and high-
level expertise to rebuilding math excellence;
• Partnerships [between schools and universities] will invite businesses, science
centers, museums and community organizations to unite with schools to improve
achievement;
• The program rewards states for increasing participation of students in advanced
courses in math and science and passing advanced placement exams;
• To ensure accountability, the Partnerships must report annually to the U.S. Sec-
retary of Education on progress in meeting their set objectives, aligned to state
standards;
• No Child Left Behind requires states to fill the nation’s classrooms with teachers
who are knowledgeable and experienced in math and science by 2005. The presi-
dent supports paying math and science teachers more to help attract experience
and excellence;
• No Child Left Behind requires that federal funding go only to those programs
that are backed by evidence;
• Over the last decade, researchers have scientifically proved the best ways to teach
reading. We must do the same in math. That means using only research-based
teaching methods and rejecting unproven fads; [and]
• The new law also requires states to measure students’ progress in math annually
in grades 3 to 8 beginning in 2005.29

Arguably, all of this reflects both traditional criticism and the presumption
that (1) contemporary American mathematics education is failing and (2)
that teachers must be monitored more exactly and severely than ever before.
Yet, we are not entirely convinced of the validity of some of the points cited
by the administration and upon which, in part, NCLB is based. There are,
of course, dangers, especially with respect to the annual testing provision and
the concomitant demand for curriculum standards and standardization. For
as we have maintained previously, in addition to curriculum and instruction

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The Mathematics Curriculum 55

per se, the imperatives of democracy, antioppression, authenticity, and the
collective good must be kept in mind.30

TIMSS
The criticisms implied in NCLB and other models of SBER frequently
draw on various kinds of formal and comparative testing data. Much of this
criticism chastises American schools, teachers, and children for under-
performing with respect to and against those in other “industrialized,” coun-
tries. Most specifically, TIMSS asks:

• How does student knowledge of mathematics . . . in the United States compare
with that of students in other nations?
• How do . . . mathematics curricula and expectations for student learning in the
United States compare with those of other nations?
• How does classroom instruction in the United States compare with that of other
nations?
• Do U.S. teachers receive as much support in their efforts to teach as do their
counterparts in other nations? [and]
• Are U.S. students as focused on their studies as their international counterparts?31

TIMSS, perhaps, offers the most comprehensive comparison of interna-
tional mathematics achievement in existence. But what does it really say?
How badly, or how well, in other words, do American children do?
TIMSS focuses mainly on the mathematical ability and achievement lev-
els of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students, and involves thirty-eight
participating nations. The most recent and comprehensive data come from
1999 results and focus on fourth- and eighth-grade students. Specifically,
TIMSS demonstrates that (for eighth-grade students, among other find-
ings):

• In 1999, U.S. eighth-graders exceeded the international average of the thirty-
eight participating nations in mathematics and science;
• In mathematics, U.S. eighth-grade students outperformed their peers in seven-
teen nations, performed similarly to their peers in six nations, and performed lower
than their peers in fourteen nations in 1999;
• Of the five mathematics content areas assessed in 1999, U.S. eighth-graders per-
formed higher than the international average in fractions and number sense; data
representation, analysis, and probability; and algebra. They performed at the in-
ternational average of the 38 TIMSS-R—with “R” defined as “repeat”— nations
in measurement and geometry; and
• In 1999, the United States was one of sixteen TIMSS-R nations in which eighth-
grade boys and girls performed similarly in mathematics. In four nations, eighth-
grade boys outperformed eighth-grade girls in mathematics.32

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56 Defending Public Schools

Additionally, TIMSS indicates that between 1995 and 1999 (with respect
to the twenty-three nations that participated in both TIMSS and TIMSS-R):

• . . . There was no change in eighth-grade mathematics . . . achievement in the
United States . . . ;
• Across the five mathematics content areas in common between TIMSS and
TIMSS-R, there was no change in achievement for eighth-graders in the United
States and most of the other twenty-two nations;
• U.S. eighth-grade black students showed an increase in their achievement in
mathematics over the four years. . . . U.S. eighth-grade white and Hispanic stu-
dents showed no change in their mathematics . . . achievement between 1995 and
1999; and
• There were no changes in mathematics . . . achievement for U.S. eighth-grade
boys and girls between 1995 and 1999.33

Moreover, TIMSS compared the achievement of eighth-grade students in
1999 with their achievement in 1995 when they were fourth-graders. It
found that (among other discoveries), “the mathematics . . . performance of
the United States relative to this group of nations was lower for eighth-grad-
ers in 1999 that it was for fourth-graders 4 years earlier, in 1995.” Thus,
students in the United States seemed to do better in mathematics in grade
four than in grade eight.
Lastly, TIMSS commented on “Teaching and Curriculum in 1999,” es-
pecially regarding “differences in teaching and curriculum between the
United States and other TIMSS-R nations.” Specifically:

• According to their teachers, U.S. eighth-grade students were less likely than their
international peers to be taught mathematics by teachers with a major or main
area of study in mathematics, but as likely as their international peers to be taught
by teachers who majored in mathematics education . . . ;
• Ninety-four percent of U.S. eighth-graders said that their mathematics teachers
showed them how to do mathematics problems almost always or pretty often in
1999, which was higher than the international average of 86 percent;
• Eighty-six percent of U.S. eighth-grade students reported that they worked from
worksheets or textbooks on their own almost always or pretty often during math-
ematics lessons in 1999, which was higher than the international average of 59
percent;
• A higher percentage of U.S. eighth-graders reported using computers almost al-
ways or pretty often in mathematics classes (12 percent) . . . than their interna-
tional peers in 1999 (5 percent); [and]
• A higher percentage of U.S. eighth-grade students reported that they could al-
most always or pretty often begin their mathematics . . . homework during class
(74 percent . . .) than their international peers (42 percent . . .).34

Overall, and in the end, with respect to the findings of TIMSS and TIMSS-
R, math education in the United States seems at least adequate. While not

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The Mathematics Curriculum 57

perfect, in our view and even in that of TIMSS, many positive and produc-
tive processes ultimately take place.

NAEP
NAEP serves well as a source of criticism for those opposed to the con-
temporary workings of American mathematics education. Yet NAEP, like
TIMSS, shows that in many ways students are doing fairly well (surprisingly
or not). In fact, the major findings for fourth- and eighth-graders, the same
subset of students measured by TIMMS, are that:

• The percentages of fourth-graders performing at or above Basic, at or above Pro-
ficient, and at Advanced were all higher in 2003 than in all previous assessment
years since 1990 [Basic, Proficient, and Advanced are terms employed by NAEP
to represent levels of student achievement];
• The percentages of eighth-graders performing at or above Basic and at or above
Proficient were both higher in 2003 than in all previous years since 1990; [and]
• The percentage of eighth-graders performing at Advanced was higher in 2003
than in 1990.35

Like TIMSS, what NAEP demonstrates, contrary to the views of many con-
temporary critics of mathematics education in the United States, is that stu-
dents do—and are doing—a pretty reasonable job. In other words, fourth-
and eighth-graders know more—and are being taught more by their teach-
ers—than perhaps many Americans suspect.

NCTM: PRINCIPLES AND STANDARDS
The NCTM has long sought to improve and strengthen preK–12 math-
ematics curricula through the creation of rigorous and substantive standards
documents, including those related to teaching, content, and assessment (as
well as others). Perhaps today, the most significant is its Principles and Stan-
dards for School Mathematics, published in 2000. Together with the curricu-
lum standards developed in the various states and local districts, Principles
and Standards presents a powerful guide to, and influence upon, contem-
porary mathematics education.
Principles and Standards initially builds from its foundational “six prin-
ciples for school mathematics.” These are:

• Equity: Excellence in mathematics education requires equity—high expectations
and strong support for all students.
• Curriculum: A curriculum is more than a collection of activities; it must be co-
herent, focused on important mathematics, and well articulated across the grades.
• Teaching: Effective mathematics teaching requires understanding what students
know and need to learn and then challenging and supporting them to learn it well.

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58 Defending Public Schools

• Learning: Students must learn mathematics with understanding, actively build-
ing new knowledge from experience and previous knowledge.
• Assessment: Assessment should support the learning of important mathematics and
furnish useful information to both teachers and students.
• Technology: Technology is essential in teaching and learning mathematics; it in-
fluences the mathematics that is taught and enhances students’ learning.36

Of course, for this chapter, the curriculum principle is most important. As
the NCTM states:

In a coherent curriculum, mathematical ideas are linked to and build on one
another so that students’ understanding and knowledge deepen and their abil-
ity to apply mathematics expands. An effective mathematics curriculum focuses
on important mathematics that will prepare students for continued study and
for solving problems in a variety of school, home, and work settings. A well-
articulated curriculum challenges students to learn increasingly more sophisti-
cated mathematical ideas as they continue their studies.37

In addition, Principles and Standards includes five “content standards”
and five “process standards.” The content standards emphasize both inter-
disciplinary topics—“number and operations,” “measurement,” “data analy-
sis and probability”—and disciplinary topics—“algebra,” “geometry.” The
process standards embody skills and understandings pertinent not only just
to mathematics, but to other subject matter areas and domains as well. They
encompass “problem solving,” “reasoning and proof,” “communication,”
“connections” (i.e., content integration), and “representations” (i.e., the
depiction of mathematical ideas in the forms of “pictures, concrete materi-
als, tables, graphs . . . symbols, spreadsheet displays, and so on”).38
Although some of the orientations and specifics of the NCTM’s work
might be controversial, as is the case with any other system of curriculum
standards, the organization does succeed in melding teaching and learning;
purpose, curriculum, instruction, and assessment; disciplinarity and inter-
disciplinarity; fact and skill; content and process; traditionalism and change;
and criticism and praise. All things considered, the NCTM has outdone the
work of many other professional educational organizations.

PROFICIENCY
Regardless of particular, personal opinions, albeit most optimistically, ev-
eryone interested in mathematics education desires and advocates “math-
ematical proficiency.” That is, no matter ideology or educational philosophy,
we all want students to know and to be able to do and understand math as
well as possible.
But what is mathematical proficiency? Certainly, it can mean different
things to different people. NCTM posits that their ambitious Standards are

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The Mathematics Curriculum 59

required to develop societal members who have the capability to think and
reason mathematically and who possess a useful base of knowledge and skills;
that is, a mathematically proficient society, Regardless of what it might mean,
we (1) follow the National Research Council (NRC) and (2) ground profi-
ciency in the “nature” and hermeneutics of the curriculum.
According to the NRC in Adding It Up, mathematical proficiency incor-
porates five interrelated or “intertwined strands” of comprehension, namely:

• conceptual understanding—comprehension of mathematical concepts, operations,
and relations;
• procedural fluency—skill in carrying out procedures flexibly, accurately, efficiently,
and appropriately;
• strategic competence—ability to formulate, represent, and solve mathematical prob-
lems;
• adaptive reasoning—capacity for logical thought, reflection, explanation, and jus-
tification; [and]
• productive disposition—habitual inclination to see mathematics as sensible, use-
ful, and worthwhile, coupled with a belief in diligence and one’s own efficacy.39

Moreover:

. . . the five strands are interwoven and interdependent in the development of pro-
ficiency in mathematics. . . . [Thus, m]athematical proficiency is not a one-di-
mensional trait, and it cannot be achieved by focusing on just one or two of
these strands. . . . That proficiency should enable [children/students] to cope
with the mathematical challenges of daily life and enable them to continue their
study of mathematics in high school and beyond. . . . The five strands provide
[in the end] a framework for discussing the knowledge, skills, abilities, and
beliefs that constitute mathematical proficiency.40

As critical as we can be, and have sometimes been in the past, we recog-
nize that NCTM, TIMSS, NAEP, and the variety of both supporters and
critics of contemporary mathematics education all hope for some level of
mathematical proficiency, and that fundamentally mathematical proficiency,
whatever its nature, is imperative with respect to a high quality mathemati-
cal education.

CONCLUSIONS: PROSECUTION, DEFENSE, VERDICT
No one can argue that the world is becoming more mathematical. Un-
fortunately, decision makers do not think mathematically at times and, thus,
decisions are often made that could have benefited from mathematical in-
sights drawn from teachers and mathematics educators. While, clearly, not
all that occurs relative to mathematics education is perfect, certainly a lot of
good does transpire. There are, of course, various differences of opinion.

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60 Defending Public Schools

Nonetheless, we believe that whatever good occurs can be attributed to
teachers and students (and, no doubt, others) as they strive to do their very
best under often difficult circumstances (frequently imposed upon schools
by the various powers that be). Our verdict? Mathematics education is strong
and ever evolving (though interested readers might see the recent special issue
of Educational Leadership41 for more details), though, indeed, it is not all
that it can be.
The authors advocate that mathematics be taught using engaging, col-
laborative, and pedagogically-sound strategies and that authentic investiga-
tions be effectively integrated such that learners of mathematics realize that
mathematics is a natural, integral, and necessary part of their life. By expe-
riencing the natural connections between the mathematics curriculum and
their everyday lives while using appropriate tools and technology, students
will come to view mathematics as an enjoyable part of their environment.
Regardless, mathematics in our schools must remain a key point of concern.
If and only if we take mathematics education seriously, can we even begin
to claim that we are doing all the positive that we can do to meet the needs
of twenty-first century learners.

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— 5 —

Science in Public Schools:
What Is It and Who Is It For?
BRUCE JOHNSON AND ELISABETH ROBERTS

Science literacy for all is the hallmark of science education reform in public
schools today. It is an appealing idea, one that seems at first glance to be
rather straightforward. In practice, it has been anything but that.
Take a moment and think about the meanings of two interwoven aspects
of science literacy for all. First, what is it? What does it mean to be scientifi-
cally literate? Second, who is it for? Are we talking about what is important
and relevant for all students, or are we talking about exposing all students
to science in the hope that more will master its rigors and become our next
generation of scientists?
In this chapter, we explore these two important aspects of science in the
public schools. Rather than artificially separate the discussion into the “what”
and the “who,” we talk about them together. They are truly two sides of
the same issue, and it seems to us to make sense to deal with them in that
way. First, we look at how we got where we are in science education today.
Next, we explore the current major emphases, issues, and realities. Finally,
we contrast where we are with where we might be in relation to science lit-
eracy for all.

HOW WE GOT HERE
For over 100 years, what constitutes science in public schools in the
United States has swung between an emphasis on content and an emphasis
on process. These shifts have been closely related to changes in perceptions

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62 Defending Public Schools

of the purposes of public schools. For science, the debate has been between
preparing future scientists and helping all people understand science and its
applications in and to their lives. The place of science in the public school
system became established in the late 1800s through the influence of those
in higher education, such as the Committee of Ten, who essentially deter-
mined the curriculum of the new public schools by setting college entrance
requirements. Science began to take its place in education as both a subject
and a method of instruction.
During the early part of the twentieth century, the rapid spread of public
education beyond K–8 led to calls for a common curriculum for high schools.
The common science subjects that are almost universally found in high
schools date back to the 1920s. Biology, chemistry, and physics became the
standard set of courses, while other areas of science were either set aside or
subsumed into these courses. For instance, specific courses in botany, zool-
ogy, or anatomy were merged, at least to some extent, into biology. Other
sciences such as geology and astronomy were, for the most part, left out.
At the same time, school science became firmly founded on the disciplines
of science—in other words, the disciplines themselves determined what
knowledge, models, and examples within a field must be mastered in order
for students to be deemed scientifically literate. In the public school curricu-
lum, science remained a “classic” discipline, meant for those students intend-
ing to continue on to college. As scientific knowledge grew and became more
specialized during the first half of the twentieth century, so to did the ac-
companying textbooks and curricula.
In contrast to the increased focus on specialized curricula, the progres-
sive education movement issued repeated calls for an examination of the
purposes of schooling. John Dewey and others called for reform in order to
make schools more relevant to students and more focused on the needs of
society. In science, this meant such things as concentrating on broad ideas
and principles, providing opportunities for students to develop critical think-
ing skills, using “real” problems, and emphasizing the practical applications
of science.
Through the late 1940s and the 1950s, there was a gradual movement
away from the concern about social and personal relevance in education that
had been a focus of the progressive education movement. A shortage of sci-
entists in World War II was one of the factors that led to a rejection of the
progressive education movement. With the Soviet Union’s launch of Sput-
nik in 1957, the gradual shift became an overnight crusade to change sci-
ence education in order to produce more and better scientists. The crisis of
Sputnik and the Cold War with the USSR led the United States government
to launch its own massive effort in curriculum reform in general and in sci-
ence education in particular. There was an unprecedented level of support
and funding from the federal government, much of it through the
government’s National Science Foundation. Jerome Bruner and Joseph

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Science in Public Schools 63

Schwab provided the theoretical basis for the curriculum reform movement
of the 1960s. Bruner emphasized teaching the structure and organized con-
tent or knowledge of science, while Schwab focused on the processes of in-
quiry used by scientists. Scientists became increasingly involved, coming up
with the “big ideas” of their disciplines for which courses could be designed.
The aims of science education included both knowledge and processes in the
pursuit of the end result of more scientists and engineers. There was little
emphasis on how science relates to social problems or to the lives of the learn-
ers. Practicality was out and experiential learning was sent to the domain of
vocational education, often meant for those who “couldn’t handle” the “rig-
ors” of a more academic program.
Elementary education, long grounded in the child-centered philosophy
of Froebel and others (including Maria Montessori), had not until now con-
sidered science in the curriculum. Building on the field of developmental or
age-based psychology vis-à-vis the work of Jean Piaget, Bruner developed a
theory of the curriculum as a “spiral”—that one could teach any subject at
any age, provided the content was represented in a way that was accessible
to the developing mind of the learner. For example, Piaget argued that chil-
dren develop an understanding of function, or of how a change in one vari-
able leads to a change in another, when they squish clay on a surface with
their hand and discover that the harder they squish, the flatter the clay be-
comes.
Such research and emerging theories on the nature of learning led to the
first stage of science education reform in the early 1960s when the instruc-
tional strategy of “hands-on” learning was first introduced. The 1960s and
1970s brought a wide range of educational reforms, including everything
from classrooms without walls to “discovery-based” science programs such
as Elementary Science Study (ESS). The curriculum reform movement pro-
duced a great number of science curricula and texts, including the Biologi-
cal Sciences Curriculum Study’s texts for secondary biology classes, CHEM
Study for secondary chemistry, and Science—A Process Approach (SAPA)
and Science Curriculum Improvement Study (SCIS) for elementary science.
The baby boom generation was the first educational cohort to be exposed
to this type of science curriculum: playing with pulleys and levers, mixing
mystery powders, or building models of cellular osmosis using hardboiled
eggs, vinegar, and iodine.
Despite its power to engage learners, this first wave of elementary science
reform failed to last. Research on the nature of social change and diffusion
of innovations in schools uncovered several reasons. School administrators,
trained according to models of efficiency that arose from the Industrial Revo-
lution and behaviorist theory, believed that implementation meant delivering
the kits to classrooms. Teachers were provided few opportunities to learn
either the content on which the kits were based or the underlying model for
learning. Systems for restocking the consumable materials were rarely

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64 Defending Public Schools

established. After several years, the remains of most elementary science kits
wound up interred in the back of the school storage closet.
Even as the elementary reform faltered, the cultural liberalism of the 1960s
and 1970s, the success of the United States space program, and the grow-
ing awareness of Earth as an ecosystem gave rise to the Science-Technology-
Society (STS) movement. STS educators emphasized the practical and
personal aspects of science, the role of technology in science, and social and
cultural perspectives on science. Yet even as STS emerged, disillusionment
with the social liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s in general and with many
of its related educational reforms in particular led to the federal government’s
1983 report A Nation At Risk. The findings in the report, such as that stu-
dents failed to demonstrate basic understandings in core content on stan-
dardized tests, drove fears of the “dumbing down” of education and the loss
of a competitive intellectual and economic edge in the international arena.
Science rose to the status of literacy and mathematics as key to national in-
terests. Federal funding again poured into science education reform with the
goal of not only producing future scientists, but also educating all citizens
to become better decision makers in a complex, scientific world.

WHERE WE ARE
It was in this context that the current reform efforts were born. While
concerns about a lack of well-prepared scientists were (and are still) frequently
heard, changes in our understandings about the nature of science and of
learning in science have led to a new vision for science education, that of
“inquiry.” Inquiry as a unifying theme in science education aims to provide
coherence across our philosophies of what knowledge in science is most
important, our beliefs about how people learn and use science, and recom-
mendations about science teaching and assessment. As such, inquiry is nec-
essarily a fuzzy notion, not unlike democracy, and represents many interests.
Although most educators and scientists agree on the general ideas of inquiry,
fundamental differences in belief about science education remain. In fact, not
one but two sets of “national” guidelines for science education emerged:
Benchmarks for Science Literacy, produced by the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1993, and the National Science Edu-
cation Standards, produced by the National Research Council (NRC) in
1996. A brief explanation of the origins and distinguishes features of each
document is critical to understanding the challenges of science education that
public schools now face.
In 1989, the AAAS published a slim book, Science for All Americans. The
result of three years of research and negotiation among scientists, mathema-
ticians, educators, philosophers, and historians, the book judged the present
science curriculum to be “overstuffed and undernourished” and argued for
“a common core of learning . . . limited to the ideas and skills having the

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Science in Public Schools 65

greatest scientific and educational significance for scientific literacy.”1 Science
for All Americans defines the scientifically literate person as:

one who is aware that science, mathematics, and technology are interdepen-
dent human enterprises with strengths and limitations; understands key con-
cepts and principles of science; is familiar with the natural world and recog-
nizes both its diversity and unity; and uses scientific knowledge and scientific
ways of thinking for individual and social purposes.

This was a radically new conception of both science as a discipline and
the purposes of science education. Science is now characterized as a human
pursuit inextricable from cultural values, economics, and politics; dependent
on mathematics as a language of reasoning; and integrally tied to technol-
ogy design and development.
Three years after Science for All Americans, AAAS published Benchmarks
for Science Literacy, the first comprehensive “map” to essential understand-
ings, or “benchmarks,” in science. The metaphor of benchmarks is embed-
ded in a newer psychology of human cognition that views “understanding”
as a complex web of interdependent concepts that develop both from con-
crete experiences and our reflection on those experiences. It is key to un-
derstand that benchmarks are neither “facts” nor “outcomes” in the
traditional sense of educational objectives but rather landmarks of cognitive
knowledge that are necessary for a literate person in order to understand
science concepts, reason scientifically, and comprehend the nature of scien-
tific inquiry and how scientific knowledge has been constructed through-
out history. The authors of Benchmarks de-emphasized the use of scientific
vocabulary, traditionally a large proportion of instruction and testing in sci-
ence, arguing that few adults will remember or need to know the differences
between revolve and rotate, nimbus and cumulus clouds, or meiosis and
mitosis. They also consciously chose not to use the technical language of
educational objectives but instead to phrase the goals in language that chil-
dren at different levels of cognitive development would use. Thus, for ex-
ample, a typical benchmark from grades six to eight, The Living
Environment, reads: “By the end of 8th grade, students should know that
individual organisms with certain traits are more likely than others to sur-
vive and have offspring. Changes in environmental conditions can affect the
survival of individual organisms and entire species.”2 Likewise, Benchmarks
identifies abilities to do science and understandings of the nature of science:
“Scientists differ greatly in what phenomena they study and how they go
about their work. Although there is no fixed set of steps that all scientists
follow, scientific investigations usually involve the collection of relevant evi-
dence, the use of logical reasoning, and the application of imagination in
devising hypotheses and explanations to make sense of the collective evi-
dence.”3

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66 Defending Public Schools

The authors of Benchmarks describe its development as “truly a grass-roots
effort” involving hundreds of teachers, administrators, engineers, mathema-
ticians, and scientists (etc.) who met in an iterative process over three years
and across almost all fifty states. The Benchmarks discuss in detail issues of
language and thinking about learning that the development group grappled
with during their process. They describe the research base and specific find-
ings with which they worked and carefully acknowledge their stumbling
blocks, pitfalls, and the reasons behind their choices of metaphors, such as
benchmark, and regarding their views relative to the division of grade levels
and underlying theories of human development, learning, and teaching. Their
intent, as described in the preface, was to meet the challenges of education
in the context of exploding types and quantities of scientific knowledge and
an increasingly diverse society, “not by offering a standard curriculum to be
adopted locally but by providing educators in every state and school district
with a powerful tool to use in fashioning their own curricula.”
If these samples of the Benchmarks signify that this is not the science of
yesteryear or the science that most Americans think children should learn
in public school, then most people probably agree—that is, such a view prob-
ably dominates. Two fundamental decisions—to de-emphasize both techni-
cal vocabulary and phrasing in terms of measurable objectives—represent a
definite shift in beliefs away from science as authority toward all people having
an understanding of, and a voice in, the conduct of science. This shift fol-
lows in the footsteps of modern philosophers, such as Thomas Kuhn, and
the emergence of postmodernist sociological research into the actual prac-
tices of scientists. Educators now propose that the traditional “correct” sci-
entific method, that of testing hypotheses, is but one process embedded in
a larger system of inquiry into the natural world that is not necessarily “ob-
jective” per se but rather and inherently one that emerges from human cul-
ture and communications practices. For those coming from traditional
scientific training or educational systems, this represents nothing less than a
new worldview, a new paradigm. And as Kuhn pointed out in The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions, new paradigms are neither obvious nor easily ac-
cepted by those trained within the conceptual “box” of the old. School and
curriculum practices arise out of a continuous negotiation among diverse
cultural and political beliefs. As such, in the case of science education, many
critical issues have not yet been reconciled.
Although Project 2061 and the development of Benchmarks had been
underway at AAAS for nearly eight years, a second group of educators and
scientists convened under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences
and the National Research Council with a federal mandate to develop a set
of national standards in science. This group published its version as the
National Science Education Standards (NSES) in 1996. In contrast to the
Benchmarks, the NSES grew out of A Nation At Risk and a resulting move-
ment for national education standards first put forth by the National Gov-

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Science in Public Schools 67

ernors Association (headed by then governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton) in
1989. While acknowledging Benchmarks and Science for All Americans as
“precursors,” the NSES are presented as the “official” guideline document
for science education and differ in several essential respects from its prede-
cessors.
A brief comparison of the tables of contents (see Table 5.1) demonstrates
the differences in underlying beliefs about the nature of science and what
should concern science education, particularly in the realm of what content
knowledge is deemed important and how that content is to be organized.
Note that the NSES eliminate mathematics and retain the original physical-
life-earth science structure of the early high school curriculum as well as tra-
ditional disciplines of study. The nature of science is presented as
Inquiry-with-a-capital-I, whereas the history and nature of science are pre-
sented as secondary to knowledge in the disciplines. (One could argue, in
the light of modern thinking, that both documents err by attempting to
separate out “the nature of science” from a discussion of knowledge.) One
strength of the NSES as a document is that it presents the “content under-
standings” of science within the context of the larger systemic factors that
must be in place to support true educational reform, including teacher pro-
fessional development, assessment, program design, and community supports.
In this, the NRC upstaged AAAS, who had designed its overall project with
these elements and was working on several publications in support of the
Benchmarks.4
There are ongoing debates and concerns about both of these guides, as
well as the state and district standards that have emerged in their wake. In

Table 5.1
Comparison of Table of Contents in Science Content Areas

Benchmarks
for Science Literacy NSES

The Nature of Science Unifying Concepts and Processes
The Nature of Mathematics Science as Inquiry
The Nature of Technology Physical Science
The Physical Setting Life Science
The Living Environment Earth and Space Science
The Human Organism Science and Technology
Human Society Science in Personal and Historical Perspectives
The Designed World History and Nature of Science
The Mathematical World
Historical Perspectives
Common Themes
Habits of Mind

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68 Defending Public Schools

particular, many ask: Who determines what is of “greatest scientific and edu-
cational significance?” This is a valid question in a pluralistic democracy, one
that is acknowledged by the authors of SFAA and Benchmarks but not by
the NSES. While some of the members of AAAS sat on the advisory board
and team that directed NSES, each document arose from different purposes,
and each has philosophical roots in early and ongoing conversations about
the purposes of public schooling. In theory, the emergence of two sets of
standards in science could be heralded as giving more options to districts,
schools, teachers, and curriculum developers—Apple or IBM. In practice, the
NSES as “official” public policy has become the more widely promoted and
cited document. We suspect this is due to its being more reflective of the
traditional “structure of the disciplines” model of science. The Standards
align more readily with existing college entrance examination requirements,
standardized tests, and the multibillion dollar educational materials indus-
try. Regardless of one’s political leanings, however, both documents raise
particular challenges that have been left to the users to solve. Our discus-
sion now examines some of these.

CHALLENGES
As always in education, one overarching question is how best to turn
theory into practice. While the vision of “inquiry” is grounded in research
on cognition and learning, we are still far from certain exactly how to de-
sign learning experiences that will result in students’ achievement of under-
standing of all the 200-plus Benchmarks or Standards by the end of grade
twelve. We also must grapple with the traditional power structures and mod-
els of schooling that hold to a “one size fits most” view of learning and teach-
ing and must negotiate a consumer-driven, sound-bite oriented culture. For
example, research across disciplines indicates that learning is a continual pro-
cess of making sense of our experiences through hands-on investigation and
reflection, communication, and negotiation within a community or culture.
Novices become experts through an iterative process of encountering and
solving problems, one by which they construct some understanding of both
deep content knowledge and problem-solving strategies. Expertise is a mul-
tifaceted phenomenon that includes the ability to focus attention, sustain
motivation, recognize patterns, recall prior experiences with similar problems,
and to see “under” the surface features of a problem through to the big ideas.
We know that expertise in physics, for example, is the ability to see under
the concrete features of a ball and a ramp to recognize that the problem is
really about forces. A scientist has the ability to interpret data in the light of
theory, to weigh evidence and construct arguments that will illuminate or
challenge existing explanations. Still, scientists and science learners are
cognitively very different. In science education, we know a lot more about
how to describe the characteristics of “experts” than we do about how to

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Science in Public Schools 69

develop them. Scientists conduct inquiry with and from a deep knowledge
base and an apprenticeship in research methods. In contrast, science students
encounter content knowledge understandings at the same time they are learn-
ing methods of inquiry. Students’ discourse in a community of learners,
framed within traditional school structures such as forty-five-minute class
periods, has very different processes and rules than discourse in a commu-
nity of scientists. Science in the last fifty years has become increasingly dis-
tributed across a network of people, laboratories, and countries who
coordinate their work in order to address data-intensive questions such as
the nature of matter or the sequence of the human genome. Yet students
are still being instructed and evaluated primarily as individuals in classrooms
that have little connection to the outside world beyond the realm of the
commercial Internet. Finally, we know that students interpret experiences
from their senses, which can lead them to “naïve conceptions” or “miscon-
ceptions.” Overcoming misconceptions requires multiple experiences, care-
ful reasoning, and time for students’ brains to develop the ability to reason
abstractly and logically. The Benchmarks and the Standards have presented
science educators with a paradox: construct learning experiences that engage
and empower all learners that nevertheless result in their achieving an un-
derstanding of over 200 specific items. How does a school system with stan-
dards, regulations, standardized tests, and college admissions concerns
reconcile itself to such a stochastic outcome, to these disparities between the
nature of science and of education?
Given the advances in our understanding of how people learn, and that
learning is an active process of sense-making, we can no longer speak of sci-
ence as a body of accumulated facts without equally considering how those
facts are developed and understood by students. We know from four decades
of research that people learn through an active, experiential process, filter
their experiences through prior knowledge and beliefs, and develop both
communication and reasoning skills through extended practice with lan-
guage, discourse, and symbol systems or representations (such as mathemat-
ics). Yet the specifics of what inquiry is, what it looks like in action, and other
practical matters have been left to today’s generation of teachers and edu-
cators to create. Needless to say, this has caused a few bumps in the road to
science literacy for all.
As an example of some of the promises and challenges of implementing
the vision of “inquiry” in public schools, we offer a story from our own
experience. Beginning in the 1970s, a group of researchers in cognitive psy-
chology began to focus on children’s understandings of particular science
concepts. This research revealed that while students often could “demon-
strate” knowledge by selecting the correct answer on a test, they retained
fundamental misunderstandings that were masked by their ability to memo-
rize vocabulary. In physics, students could define “heat” and “temperature”
without being able to explain how one related to the other, or why it was

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70 Defending Public Schools

important to calibrate a thermometer in an experiment. Students clung to
ideas based on daily life, such as the idea that different objects at room tem-
perature are warmer or cooler because they feel so to the touch—when in
fact the objects are at the same ambient temperature (it is the different trans-
fer rates of heat from our hands to the object that creates the sensation of
different temperatures).5
Some of these researchers then went on to exploit the powers of a new
tool, the microcomputer, to allow students to collect temperature data
through electronic probes and instantly view that data as a graph of tem-
perature change over time on the computer screen. These “microcomputer-
based laboratories” (commonly known as MBL or CBL) promised to
“revolutionize science education” with the power of real-time experiments
and graphic representations. In fact, several researchers6 did find that, un-
der certain conditions, middle and high school students were able to develop
a depth of conceptual understanding of the difference between heat and tem-
perature as well as an ability to interpret correctly graphical displays of data
(one of the most persistent problems in science and mathematics education
today).
Over the past twenty years, the development and availability of these and
other technology “tools for learning” has exploded, especially in science and
mathematics. Technology supplies powerful tools to support inquiry. The
features of real-time data collection and display, video, animation, and other
multimedia presentations all have been shown to help students develop con-
ceptual understandings of important underlying phenomena in science, es-
pecially those that are highly abstract (such as heat and temperature), exist
at scales we are otherwise unable to observe (macroscopic and microscopic,
extremely long or short periods of time), or conflict with everyday experi-
ence (such as Newton’s laws of motion in a world without friction).7 Scien-
tists, in fact, created the Internet as a tool for exchanging large amounts of
geographically dispersed data.
Why then do we not see these tools in every science classroom, at appro-
priate grade levels? On one hand, initially, there were practical realities. Most
of the money in technology budgets for education went into wiring schools
for the Internet, managing networks, and purchasing hardware and software.
Additionally, there was either a lack of vision or a daunting degree of resis-
tance to change. Few resources were invested in developing or communi-
cating a vision of technology or providing teacher professional development
to ensure equitable distribution and curriculum integration. As Seymour
Papert described, schools reacted to technology innovations by “inoculat-
ing” against the innovation—isolating technology from daily school activity
by setting it aside in laboratories reserved for a few. Moreover, we would
argue further that an innovation such as collecting and analyzing real-world
data with microcomputers went against our culture’s deeply held beliefs
about what science education “ought to be.”

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Science in Public Schools 71

Lastly, we raise a philosophical question. Even if the MBL is a tool that
helps students overcome misunderstandings about heat and temperature,
how important is that understanding for all students to achieve by the time
they graduate from high school? Is it more important than understanding
where the energy comes from to heat or cool our homes and schools? From
a curriculum perspective, how important is this concept relative to other
scientific understandings needed by all Americans? To physicists (it was pri-
marily physicists who began this educational research), this idea is key to a
body of knowledge in energy and thermodynamics and, therefore, of press-
ing importance to research, technology design, and educational reform. From
an educator’s perspective, perhaps there are two big ideas to get to by twelfth
grade: All matter is composed of atoms, and all matter exists in different states
depending on the amount of energy atoms can absorb and transfer. To most
educators, neither of these ideas is useful or appropriate to children whose
brains have not developed to the point where they can reason abstractly about
invisible phenomena. But, from the perspective of daily life, perhaps the most
important thing to understand is that one doesn’t want to lick a metal pole
when the temperature is below freezing.
Thus has science reform emerged in practice. As in many large-scale re-
form efforts of the last fifty years, social and political pressures for immedi-
ate solutions propelled science educators to recommend and roll out full-scale
implementation of curriculum, assessment, and teacher professional devel-
opment even before the NSES went to press. As a predictable result, schools
and teachers have struggled with developing practical solutions in a high-
stakes, high-expectations environment over the last ten years. To some de-
gree, avoiding a definition of inquiry was a legitimate choice for educators
who hold constructivist beliefs, as a central tenet of constructivist teaching
and learning is that there is no “one right way” to “do” inquiry. But in the
traditional system of public schooling, such uncertainty is difficult to accept.
Though neither the Benchmarks nor the Standards are intended to be guides
to either curriculum or instruction, they often are interpreted as such. An
entire industry of “standards-based” textbooks, instructional materials,
teacher professional development programs, assessments, and research has
grown in their wake. Most new textbooks now include a table at the front
that purports to align the content in the text with specific benchmarks or
standards. District and state adoption committees pressed for time and re-
sources often rely on these tables, rather than the content or instructional
methods within, to select new materials for their schools. The result is a
general misconception among the public and educators that a standard can
be “taught” in one or two classroom activities. Thus, for science curricu-
lum today, most people embrace a fuzzy notion of inquiry as “hands on and
minds on,” while they lack an appreciation of the complexity of orchestrat-
ing such a process for all learners.

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72 Defending Public Schools

Despite these problems, the past ten years have demonstrated that inquiry
is more than just a vision when it is implemented and supported systemi-
cally. We have learned from our earlier reforms. This time, educators and
policymakers were aware that a philosophical commitment to a vision of “in-
quiry” would require a host of practical and structural considerations. Both
AAAS and NSES followed their standards documents with others8 that ar-
ticulated the various parts and interactions among them that are needed to
create organic and long-term change. A second wave of large-scale federal
curriculum development grants, mirroring those of the early 1960s, gener-
ated a new generation of “inquiry-based” curriculum programs, such as Full
Option Science System (FOSS), INSIGHTS, and STC. Soon after came a
wave of large-scale reform programs funded by the National Science Foun-
dation to provide intensive and sustained teacher professional development
in order to ensure the curriculum materials would be fully implemented in
classrooms.
Research from these efforts, some in the form of program evaluations,
highlights the central importance of considering curriculum as a system that
extends beyond the physical materials to include vision and leadership, pro-
fessional development, assessment, and the larger range of resources, such
as parents, communities, and businesses.9 In the emergence of the ecologi-
cal and narrative research traditions, action research, and partnerships be-
tween researchers and teachers in real-world schools, we begin to build
understanding of the ways in which diverse learners can engage in science.
When communities put these integrated pieces into place over five to ten
years, children can develop a sense of science and the natural world that is
conceptually rich, embodies the nature of science and scientific habits of
mind, involves more learners (not only the select few), and affects student
achievement not only in science but also in so-called core areas, such as lan-
guage arts and mathematics.10 In these communities, local leadership, espe-
cially that of the principal, has been critical to developing and sustaining the
vision, management, financial resources, and political will necessary to make
long- and large-scale science education reform happen.
There are, however, still too many cases where one or more of these sys-
temic pieces is missing or is not aligned with a (if not the) vision of inquiry.
As in our above example of the MBL, a gap exists between the vision of the
standards and the realities of available time, resources, and beliefs. Assess-
ments in the form of high-stakes testing are not aligned with the teaching
and learning promoted in science education reform efforts. Curriculum se-
lection and time allotted to subject areas are driven by standardized tests. It
is not atypical for an elementary teacher to be told that he or she must give
up instructional time for science to these other areas or to practice test-tak-
ing skills. Middle school science teachers are told to prepare their students
for the rigors of mostly traditional (content coverage) high school classes,
which in turn are rigidly defined by standardized achievement tests and col-

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Science in Public Schools 73

lege entrance requirements. Despite educators’ overall adoption of the vi-
sion of inquiry or constructivism, and despite twenty years of reform efforts,
our beliefs, habits, and social and cultural systems continue to frame science
as a discipline separate from, and now competing with, other content areas.

WHERE WE MIGHT BE
One would be hard pressed these days to find a science educator at any
level who would disagree with the goals of science literacy for all. It is clear
that the dual focus on content and process, on what science tells us and on
the nature of science, must be included in the “science” part of that goal.
What should be included in the “literacy for all” part of it? Because science
literacy for all is a broad concept, we have opportunities to be creative in
developing the next generation of curriculum. To return to an earlier meta-
phor, having Benchmarks as well as the Standards keeps the “market” open
for alternative approaches to both inquiry and curriculum. In fact, we would
argue that it is both possible and necessary to frame a more radical perspec-
tive to science literacy for all.
For instance, let’s look again at an example from physics, understanding
heat and temperature. Energy is a fundamental concern of science, and a
great deal of effort has gone into trying to find out what students know
about heat and temperature, what their common misconceptions are, and
how they are best addressed. These ideas have an important place in stan-
dards documents, and students across the country are taught these ideas.
How important are these ideas in everyday life? If students better understand
these ideas, what is the result? Certainly, one would hope that those going
on to study physics would understand these ideas well enough to be suc-
cessful. It may even be important for scientists studying other areas. But it
is difficult to imagine how the ideas are crucial for the rest of us.
On the other hand, there are some critical ideas about energy that are
vitally important in our daily lives. For example, each of us gets and uses
energy every day. We get our personal energy to live from the food we eat.
We also use a great deal of energy to do all kinds of things—from driving
cars to working on computers. Where does that energy come from? Much
of it comes from burning fossil fuels, in the gasoline or diesel fuel in our
vehicle and in the form of coal or natural gas used to generate electricity in
our power plants. Why is that important? First, fossil fuels exist in a limited
supply. While there is disagreement about how fast we are using up the sup-
plies, no one would argue that we have an unlimited amount. They will
someday be gone. Second, burning fossil fuels has harsh consequences, in-
cluding air pollution, acid rain, and releasing greenhouse gases into the at-
mosphere. This is an idea with implications, important implications.
Do people understand this? Hardly. Ask anyone you know where his or
her electricity comes from. What is the source of the energy used to generate

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74 Defending Public Schools

the electricity where you live? We have been asking people this question, and
hardly anyone can answer it well. Ask a related question. Is it important to
save electricity by doing things like turning out the lights when leaving a
room? If so, why? Once again, most people say it is important, but few are
able to say much beyond the ideas that wasting is bad and that saving elec-
tricity saves money. Hardly anyone understands the connection between his
or her hands on the light switch and the consequences of burning fossil fu-
els.
Surely these energy ideas are of at least equal importance to an under-
standing of heat and temperature. We would argue that they are of much
greater importance. Every one of us makes decisions about our use of elec-
tricity every day. These decisions will become even more important in the
future as fossil fuels become scarcer and the environmental consequences of
depending on them increase. They do not, though, even get equal time in
the science curriculum. Why not?
It seems that science literacy for all has meant more of the same science,
simply getting it to more students and focusing on helping more students
succeed at it rather than making the science being taught more meaningful
and important for all. The focus has been on teaching the science better
rather than on teaching better (more important) science.
There is currently a renewed focus on the big ideas of science content areas
and on understanding how science works rather than on the details and
minutiae, the facts and figures. But how have these big ideas been identi-
fied? Asking scientists to tell us what are the most important things for stu-
dents to understand about their discipline is an interesting way of going about
selecting what is important. It is based on the belief that we all need to un-
derstand a scientific discipline the way a scientist working in it does. Is that
really the best way to figure out what is important?
Taking a look at what people need to know in their everyday lives is a
different approach, one that hearkens back to John Dewey a century ago.
It brings us back to the fundamental questions about the purposes of pub-
lic schools. Are they meant to prepare people for life or to prepare them for
jobs?
Surely, public school science should help students understand how science
works—what counts as scientific evidence, what is science and what isn’t
science, and science as a way of knowing. These ideas are more evident in
the standards than they are most classrooms, but the ideas are certainly a
part of current reform efforts. A central argument in inquiry, though, is that
people learn best when they engage in active experiences that are important
and meaningful to them and connected to their daily lives and experiences.
So we would ask, then, given that we cannot teach everything in science,
especially by grade twelve, which is more important to understand?: the
mechanisms by which heat is transferred or stored in physical matter or where
the heat energy we use in our daily lives comes from and the implications

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Science in Public Schools 75

of that energy production for human and environmental survival. Ideally, we
all would have the time and resources needed to understand both. Realisti-
cally, we need to choose. Public school science should be both relevant and
important. That is where current efforts still fall short in the pursuit of sci-
ence literacy for all.

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Ch5_61-76.pmd 76 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

— 6 —

Character Education:
Coming Full Circle
FOUR ARROWS (DON TREND JACOBS)

How can they expect a harvest of thought from those who have not had the
seedtime of character.
—Henry David Thoreau

From the animals, the stars and the sun and the moon, man should learn.
—Chief Letakots-Lesa (Pawnee)

The history of Western character education can generally be categorized into
two philosophical orientations. One views character education (C.E.) as a
socialization process that inculcates “a collective moral code from the com-
munity to the individual through direct instruction, consistent modeling and
external incentives.”1 This long-standing approach, which I will refer to as
the “Conservative Model,” continues to dominate most C.E. programs in
public schools today.
The second approach stems from the progressive movement in education.
It focuses on developing the students’ ability to reason according to ethical
and moral principles or universal virtues. In contrast to the Conservative
Model, it encourages “open-mindedness, holistic moral development, inter-
active learning, allowing children to develop naturally and the cultivation of
children’s ability to make moral judgments through social experiences.”2
I will refer to this as the “Liberal Model.”

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78 Defending Public Schools

Both these models contrast with a third approach to character educa-
tion that is seldom discussed in C.E. literature because it emerges largely
from perspectives common to many non-Western indigenous cultures. This
view regards C.E. as a spiritual process hallmarked by “a sacred awareness
that we are all related and that all things in the seen and unseen universe
are interconnected.”3 This “Spiritual Model” offers a possibility not usu-
ally conceived in Western C.E., that is, the idea that moral relationships
extend beyond anthropocentricism into the visible and invisible aspects of
the natural world.
In using these models as a way to explore and understand character edu-
cation in public schools, I focus more on ideology than on statistical data
about the “success” of C.E. programs. Schooling is a socialization process
that finds direction through the ideologies of those in charge. Thus, ideo-
logical explorations seem vital to analyzing program goals as well as to ana-
lyzing how people define and measure C.E. objectives. Framing this chapter
with comparisons among these three models expands the ideological debate
and offers a unique way to reflect on which aspects of modern C.E. have
appropriate value for the future and which do not.
I want to state at the outset that I am not neutral about such choices,
and my support goes largely to the Spiritual Model. My observations have
led me to conclude that the Conservative Model is more about compliance
to authority and to the status quo than about authentic character. The Lib-
eral Model offers important reasons for C.E. but may foster only two aspects
of character, those that relate to critical thinking and to awareness of global
issues. Although these are crucial dimensions of C.E., reflection and aware-
ness alone are not sufficient to meet the most authentic universal goals of
C.E. The Spiritual Model emphasizes being at peace with oneself and one’s
relationship to the world in ways that involve feeling connected with all life
forms, ideas, again, that are largely absent from both the Conservative or
the Liberal Models.
A number of Western educators have acknowledged the importance of
indigenous perspectives in education. For example, Patrick Slattery says in
his text on the subject, “Curriculum development in the postmodern era
should give attention to the wisdom embedded in native American spiritu-
ality, for it is in the very sacred land of the native people that American edu-
cation now finds its home.”4 Similarly, Larry Brendtro, a foremost expert
in “at-risk” education states:

Native American philosophies of child management represent what is perhaps
the most effective system of positive discipline ever developed. These approaches
emerged from cultures where the central purpose of life was the education and
empowerment of children. Modern child development research is only now
reaching the point where this holistic approach can be understood, validated
and replicated.5

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Character Education 79

My endorsement of selected aspects of the indigenous worldview for ef-
fective C.E. does not mean that I believe it is privileged in the sense that it
is the only absolute truth. Rather, I concur with J. Baird Callicott, who says,

The indigenous worldviews around the globe can contribute a fund of sym-
bols, images, metaphors, similes, analogies, stories and myths to advance the
process of articulating the new postmodern worldview. Thus the contempo-
rary custodians of traditional and indigenous non-Western systems of ideas can
be co-creators of a new master narrative for the rainbow race of the global vil-
lage. They have a vital role to play. . . . We may anticipate a global intellectual
dialogue, synthesis, and amalgamation to emerge, rather than an era of West-
ern philosophical hegemony.6

With this quote in mind, I submit that public schools may be able to re-
claim an authentic role in helping to develop those student dispositions that
are vital to educational outcomes by better understanding all three models.

GROUNDING THE MODELS
Both the Conservative Model and the Liberal Model of C.E. emerge from
the history of Western education in general. Although such history is too
vast a territory to cover in this chapter, a good way to understand the na-
ture of a tree is to study its roots, and the roots of Eurocentric C.E. may
well be in Aristotle’s book The Nicomachean Ethics, arguably the first C.E.
text, written 350 years B.C.E.7
Aristotle is clear that we are not made good or bad by nature but by habit
and training. Virtues, he says, are not found in the passions or faculties of
humans but, rather, express themselves through human “states of character”
that must be developed through training and hard work. He describes states
of character as relating to intellectual or moral virtues, the former requiring
teaching, experience, and time, the latter coming about as a result of habit.
In both cases, he trusts not nature but rational thinking and teaching as the
vehicles for attaining states of character. He uses Olympic athletes as an ex-
ample of how character can be developed.
Ultimately, he claims, virtues are tied to the happiness of self and of one’s
friends. Such happiness may be thought of as either a gift from God or a
gift to God. To cultivate such happiness, however, takes time and experience
within the domain of men (again, specifically not of nature). According to
Aristotle, neither animals nor children are capable of being truly happy any
more than they are capable of being virtuous.
If we continued to study Aristotle’s treatise on virtues and C.E., we would
see the essence of ideas that would later influence the philosophies of such
thinkers as Nietzsche, James, Heidegger, Piaget, Vygotsky, and Dewey, as
well as many others whose writings addressed morality, character, child

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80 Defending Public Schools

development, curriculum, and pedagogy. Here, I summarize some assump-
tions about C.E. that these and more contemporary character educators may
have inherited from The Nicomachean Ethics.

1. Attitude, effort, and talent are essential for developing character over time.
2. Teachers possess the expertise with which to cultivate character in students.
3. Children are essentially a blank slate when it comes to character development
(C.D.). (Here Aristotle disagrees somewhat with his teacher, Plato.)
4. Nature is not a model for C.D. Only in “cities” do the tools exist for C.D.
5. Human passions and faculties can be unhealthy in the absence of C.D.
6. C.E. has both an intellectual and a moral dimension, and both require train-
ing.
7. Rational thinking is a basic requirement for C.D.
8. The source of good character comes from the human desire for happiness, both
for self and for other people in one’s society.
9. Happiness through C.D. may be thought of as either a gift from God or a gift
to God.
10. Time, teaching, and social experiences are all required for C.D.
11. The training of Olympic athletes is a model for C.D.

Both the Conservative and the Liberal Models seem to incorporate some
of these assumptions of Aristotle, in contrast to the Spiritual Model, which
seldom relates well to Aristotle’s views. I will attempt to illustrate this by
presenting Aristotle’s basic assertions (in italics), followed by a brief expla-
nation of how each of the three models might relate or might not relate.

Attitude, Effort, and Talent are Essential for Developing
Character over Time
Conservative C.E. tends to see those who do not “pick themselves up by
their bootstraps,” as per William Bennett’s message in the selection of sto-
ries for his Book of Virtues,8 as being less than virtuous. Bennett and others
of this model prefer attitude, effort, and talent to intellectualizing and re-
flecting on social experience.9 These traits, which too often have more to
do with class and income than character, are well demonstrated in the
achievement of concrete objectives and are exemplified in those who have
achieved financial success, thus serving Conservative economic agendas with
assumptions that those who have not “succeeded” simply did not have the
character to do so.
In the Liberal Model, C.E. also tends to honor these requirements,
though in a different way. It is about prosocial dispositions that require a
caring attitude, consistent effort at reflecting on social experience, and in-
tellectual talent that is developed over time. Accordingly, the task of a C.E.
teacher is to facilitate democratic experiences that promote moral delibera-
tion.10

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Character Education 81

The Spiritual Model for C.E. assumes a worldview that sees harmonious
relationship as a fundamental prerequisite for a good life. It believes this is
more important for character development than effort, attitude, talent, or
academic reflection. With such a worldview, generosity is not a goal that one
attains via conformity or intellectualism. Rather, it is the vital condition of
existence that is obvious in the symbiotic relationships in nature. C.E. in this
model is more about developing the courage to manifest this reality than a
process of authority-driven schooling that “teaches” moral dispositions.

Teachers Possess the Expertise with Which to Cultivate
Character in Students
Conservative C.E. sees this expertise in terms of what is often referred
to, following Paulo Freire, as “the banking system of education,” that is,
teachers must use their expertise to inculcate, or “deposit,” character into
students based on their expert knowledge about character. It tends to be-
lieve that a “pervasive relativism and an ultraliberal view of morals, a belief
in the absolute right and freedom of the individual to choose his or her own
lifestyle, have eroded the best of what a more traditional view of ethics and
morality once provided.”11 Therefore, a counter to such relativism is the
expert authority’s ability and will to inculcate absolute values and disposi-
tions that have “proved” themselves in the examples of historical role mod-
els.
The Liberal Model and its emphasis on social justice and critical pedagogy
also relies on the “expertise” needed by a teacher to facilitate reflection and
to guide students toward democratic practices and moral dispositions but also
encourages students to create meaning from experience. Many of the Lib-
eral Model’s assumptions about social justice awareness appear to be based
on Lawrence Kohlberg’s theories of moral development that emphasize a
sense of justice as the highest moral concept.12 The connection to Aristotle
is that Kohlberg’s stages of moral development clearly parallel Aristotle’s
levels of ethical development. Both emphasize sequential increments of
habitualized training that ultimately might lead toward the highest levels of
ethical conduct. Nel Noddings, a leader in the Liberal Model of moral edu-
cation, also refers to the importance of habit, suggesting that expertise can
be attained through habitualized activities that presumably can translate into
the authority to teach character (or “caring” in Nodding’s case).13
In the Spiritual Model, there are no “experts.” Children develop charac-
ter by valuing those traits in themselves that help them to be of value to
others. Adults tell stories, conduct ceremonies, offer feedback, and serve as
role models to maintain community welfare as an intrinsic cultural goal, but
once in place, it is natural for children to develop those virtues that lead
toward this goal. Children come directly from the spiritual world and already
possess the seeds for producing the highest degree of morality. It is up to

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82 Defending Public Schools

teachers to help them not forget this inherent wisdom. Nature and animals
serve as much as community members for “teaching” that which safeguards
this memory.
Indigenous thinking rejects the idea of the expert for the same reasons it
honors the sacred wisdom inherent in all life-forms. Giving too much sig-
nificance to a single entity risks taking significance away from another. Mean-
ing making is more important than absolute truth seeking because meaning
making gives significance to things and events. The significance comes from
a sacred realization that the microcosm is a mirror of the macrocosm and
that symbolism, ritual, historical perspectives, and a process-oriented language
are all reflections of a great but mysterious truth. To recognize this signifi-
cance calls for the character traits of patience, respect, humility, fortitude,
courage, and generosity.14

Children Are Essentially a Blank Slate When It Comes to
Developing Character
Conservative C.E. is true to Aristotle’s assertion (and later John Locke’s
philosophy) about the blank slate metaphor. It has little faith in the exist-
ence of any innate propensities toward virtue in children (let alone the rec-
ognition of the sacred wisdom discussed above that is assumed in the Spiritual
Model.) Wynne, for example, calls for teachers to “Develop written rules of
behavior for the classroom and/or the whole school which prohibit all
reasonably foreseeable forms of disruption and/or specify the behaviors
required.”15 Similarly, Nash believes that “pervasive relativism and an ultra-
liberal view of morals, a belief in the absolute right and freedom of the in-
dividual to choose his or her own lifestyle, have eroded the best of what a
more traditional view of ethics and morality once provided.”16
The Liberal Model does not abide by the concept of the blank slate per
se, emphasizing that “facts” are always subject to interpretation of some sort.
Unlike most leaders of the Conservative Model, liberal educators do not tend
to follow the ideas of Emile Durkheim, who said, “All education is a con-
tinuous effort to impose on the child ways of seeing, feeling, and acting
which he could not have arrived at spontaneously.”17 However, as described
in the next section, liberal character educators do often adopt Aristotle’s
“rational thinking” imperative, which indirectly assumes that an understand-
ing of virtue is not innate but must be developed through critical analysis.
As we have already seen, the Spiritual Model as exemplified in the indig-
enous worldview sees children not as blank slates but as beings whose sacred
knowledge is great owing to their proximity to the spirit world from which
they came.18 In practice, C.E. programs in public schools that embrace this
idea look for and find “teachable moments” in every activity and for every
aspect of the curriculum so that these sacred connections are not lost.

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Character Education 83

Rational Thinking Is a Basic Requirement for C.E.
The Conservative Model, in being critical of overintellectualizing char-
acter and favoring instead a more didactic approach, would seem to be against
Aristotle’s idea of rational thinking. Yet, in assuming the wisdom of the au-
thority that intends to inculcate character traits, conservative character edu-
cators would likely concur that the basis for their assumptions are indeed
rational. For example, Lickona, another conservative pillar of the C.E. move-
ment, maintains that there is a single, objective, universally valid notion of
human character that is not based on mere subjective preferences but on
rationally construed affirmations embraced by religious traditions around the
world.19 Conservatives claim that socialization is not mere indoctrination
because their standards are rationalized.20
The Liberal Model places more importance on rational thinking than is
exemplified by merely saying that it is behind traditional thinking. As Dewey
states, “When our faith in the scientific method is made manifest in social
works, the possibilities for the future will emerge to conquer human prob-
lems.”21 Lisman also acknowledges the vital need for rational thinking when
he says, “Being able to critically analyze ethical issues and make effective
ethical decisions is as important as the will to be moral.”22
Challenging Dewey’s confidence in science, the Spiritual Model is more
distrusting of the hypothesis-test-new hypothesis method of Western science.
Observation and experience are important in indigenous science, but verifi-
cation relates more to a “big picture,” to metaphysical perspectives, stories,
people’s histories, and to the wisdom of nature and animals. Intuitive re-
sources and prayer are more important than analysis or rationalization. Com-
munion in nature can remind one of what is already known just as well as
critical thought can, sometimes even better. Spiritual power is also incom-
prehensible. To attempt to remove mystery in the pursuit of rational wis-
dom is to risk removing that which is sacred. Thus, in the Spiritual Model
of C.E., education becomes “a vehicle for unfolding ever deeper levels of
life’s great mysteries and increasing degrees of respect for the significance
of life’s interconnections.”23

Nature Is Not a Model for C.D.
Plato, Aristotle’s teacher and student of the father of Western philosophy,
Socrates, quotes Socrates as saying, “I’m a lover of learning, and trees and
open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in town do.”24 The
Conservative Model is largely based on a Christian ideology that places man
above nature and views virtues strictly in anthropocentric terms. (To be fair
to Aristotle, he had some disagreement with Plato in this regard. Still, his
study of nature was limited.)

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84 Defending Public Schools

The Liberal Model also sees humanity as superior to nature in its respon-
sibility to be a steward of it. Although it embraces an environmental ethic,
it would not comprehend the idea that nature is a model for C.D. Even
though John Dewey did write about the problem of putting humans at the
center of the world, there is nothing I could find in his writings to indicate
that C.E. would not be a product of human interaction alone. Nel Noddings,
in her book offering a caring curriculum as an alternative to the Conserva-
tive Model, does not mention nature or ecological concerns once.25 That a
liberal character education can write an entire book about a caring curricu-
lum and not expressly relate caring to our catastrophic situation or our in-
tricate interdependence on the natural world is an example of the inability
to see the natural world as a source and a focus for virtue awareness.
According to the Spiritual Model, both dominant forms of C.E. attempt
the impossible—to bring wholeness to people who have separated from na-
ture. The Spiritual Model assumes that “Humanity is harmoniously fused
with the natural world through the ritualization of space.”26 Landscape is
sacred, embodying a divinity that it shares with everything from trees and
rocks to birds and animals. This symbiosis, so different from the conserva-
tive vision of controlling nature and the liberal vision of protecting it, is, in
the indigenous view, the source of virtue. Even love itself may be lost with-
out this sacred realization of our interconnections with nature:

Oh what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of
the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh what a catastrophe,
what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling,
taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic
connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us.
We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun
and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked
it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in
our civilized vase on the table.27

Forster long ago identified the fundamental human problem as ecological
rather than sociological. His solution was to be prepared to put aside tech-
nology and other modern conceptions that hinder connections between body
and mind and between body and Earth.28 This is the lesson that can still be
taught in our public schools through the Spiritual Model.

The Source of Good Character Comes from the Human
Desire for Happiness
Aristotle’s view of happiness has probably been misappropriated by West-
ern politics and economics, but it was not difficult to do. He believed that
happiness requires external goods in order for a man to play a noble role in

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Character Education 85

life, indirectly affirming the connection between character and the acquisi-
tion of private property. Thus, the defense of private property becomes a
primary obligation of the civic official. Happiness, according to Aristotle, is
related to reward and punishment and to reflection on a whole life. Like
Augustine after him, he equates happiness with freedom but not the free-
dom of a child who cannot know happiness until a lifetime of good choices.
It would not be difficult to make an association between these ideas and
conservative views in and on contemporary American life nor with the his-
torical emphasis on property rights, personal freedoms, and rewards and
punishments that tend to define much of Western culture. It should not,
therefore, be surprising if advocates of the Conservative Model of C.E. sup-
port didactic instruction that maintains the status quo.
The pursuit of happiness might also be embraced as a goal of C.E. in the
Liberal Model because of its association with democratic ideals. Neither
Aristotle nor John Dewey would see the idea of happiness in terms of self-
seeking pleasure but rather in terms of those habits of life that are fulfilling
to one’s self and others. Dewey begins his “Theory of the Moral Life” by
acknowledging his debt to Aristotle when he speaks about character in terms
of voluntary habitualized actions and how emotional responses can be a fail-
ure of habit.29 Dewey and other progressives behind the Liberal Model of
C.E., in their appeal for democratic ideals and social justice, seem to accept
Aristotle’s ideas that happiness is strictly a phenomenon of one’s actions in
society, actions that must be trained by habit.
Those who would lean more toward the Spiritual Model would be criti-
cal of Dewey’s position:

The idealism of the Progressive Movement, especially as illustrated through the
philosophy of John Dewey, appears to be one of the major causes for the lack
of successful implementation of his ideas. . . . To an acute observer, corporate
control of the economic base of a country would have to mean that all super-
structures within that system must reflect the ideology of the controlling group.
Yet Dewey’s definition of democracy reflects a naïve interpretation of an evi-
dent reality.... Political, economic and social realities of that time as well as today
cannot allow for educational goals or ideologies to be at variance with the rul-
ing class goals or ideologies. . . . For the above reasons this writer has not been
able to [find] in Dewey’s philosophy of the practical classroom application of
his techniques to the American Indian worldview.30

Rather than a pursuit of happiness, the Spiritual Model recognizes the
realization of significance as a more important goal for C.E. From an indig-
enous perspective, spiritual education tends to mean significant, inviting re-
flection, and possessing power.31 Spiritual power is also unconditionally
benevolent. The “Great Mysterious” is generous not because of a need to
fulfill a quest for happiness but because it is simply in the nature of creation

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86 Defending Public Schools

to be generous. Spiritual manifestations of the powers that inform all living
things also have these positive traits, so a good C.E. simply helps people
become aware of them. Further, rather than freedom as the guiding prin-
ciple, the concept of significance in the Other demands responsibility.
In their book Reclaiming Youth at Risk, Brendtro, Brokenleg, and Van
Bockern state:

Traditional Native American child-rearing philosophies provide a powerful al-
ternative in education and youth development. These approaches challenge both
the European cultural heritage of child pedagogy and the narrow perspectives
of many current psychological theories. Refined over 15,000 years of civiliza-
tion and preserved in oral traditions, this knowledge is little known outside the
two hundred tribal languages that cradle the Native Indian cultures of North
America.32

In spite of this, what good did Western assumptions about character and
education do when Americans forced their notions of character on Indian
people who survived their bloodier forms of conquest only to be taken from
their families and forced into punishing boarding schools? Rather than nur-
turing a realization of significance and acting responsibly, or cultivating ac-
tions that come from the acceptance, attention, and affection of others,
perhaps some notion of Aristotle’s ideas about earning happiness at the end
of life is behind what Block refers to as “social violence against children.”33
He refers to the kind of violence that comes from a postponement of “hap-
piness” and a separation from nature.

Time, Teaching, and Social Experiences Are All Required
for C.D.
It would be difficult to argue that time, teaching, and social experience
do not somehow contribute to developing character. Certainly, there would
be no rebuttal from either the Conservative or the Liberal Model represen-
tatives. It would seem on the surface that even a spiritual perspective would
benefit from these ingredients. From the Spiritual Model, however, comes
a challenge to the emphases and interpretations of the three “requirements”
that are used by the two other models. I have already mentioned that in the
Spiritual Model the expertise of a teacher is less important than reflection
on experience and the realization of significance of the Other. I have also
argued that the Spiritual Model gives as much value to intuitive and envi-
ronmental experience as it does to social experience. So, at this point, let us
focus our attention on the issue of “time” as it relates to C.E.
Developmental theories emphasize the importance of stages (time-based)
of and for moral development. Arguably, the most famous and most tested
theory is that of Lawrence Kohlberg. Although Kohlberg himself would be

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Character Education 87

placed in the Liberal Model, it would seem that both the Conservative and
the Liberal Models assume his conclusions to be valid, namely that people
pass through stages of avoiding punishment, reward-seeking, gaining ap-
proval, interpersonal caring, respecting authority, community welfare con-
cerns, and, finally, acting according to principles of conscience, regardless
of issues defined in the other stages. Most research seems to conclude that
very few people make it to the last two stages, and this in itself may be tell-
ing. Yet the question is Why not?
Is it possible that worldview is a more significant factor than time? Could
children embrace the highest levels much earlier in life and with much greater
frequency in the light of an alternative worldview, such as that offered by
the Spiritual Model? Is it possible that few people ever reach Kohlberg’s
higher levels because of Western paradigms that do not meet our definition
of spirituality?
Some studies have attempted to answer such questions and suggest that
worldview may play a more important role than time.34 Other studies show
that typically Western approaches to C.E. would naturally stifle the attain-
ment of authentic, non-self-serving generosity. For example, Fabes and col-
leagues have shown that chronic use of extrinsic rewards to motivate children
actually reduces generous behavior.35 Another potential problem with the
emphasis on time, teaching, and social experience as prerequisites for suc-
cessful C.E. is that it may limit thinking about other important concepts.
For example, in her master’s thesis on the relationships between First Na-
tions Teachings and “Character Education,” Yvonne Germaine Dufault dis-
cusses the importance of hope. She asks the question, “Is an underlying lack
of hope spurring or hindering character education? After significant research
and a number of interviews of Native Elders, she concluded that hope is
indeed an important aspect of character development.36 Other concepts such
as “beauty” might also be more important than time. Perhaps even time-
lessness should be considered.

The Training of Olympic Athletes Is a Model for C.E.
It would be unfair to judge Aristotle’s use of the Olympic Games in terms
of critical reflections on modern sports competition and the relative lack of
character that is too often demonstrated in competitive sports. In Aristotle’s
day, the motto “It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game”
was most important and this is, frankly, the idea that Aristotle meant to con-
vey. Nonetheless, the Olympics were competitive games and Aristotle’s use
of competitive athletes to illustrate character has proved problematic when
considering that both conservative and liberal politicians refer to school re-
form in terms of being “more competitive in the global market place” and
that much of the high-stakes testing movement is based on competitive
scoring (etc.). The Conservative Model wants children to be socialized to

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88 Defending Public Schools

conform to status quo authority and to employment market needs. The Lib-
eral Model focuses on questions of power in reaction to the injustices that
result from the dog-eat-dog ethic of capitalism but still tends to view the
world as competitive in nature.
The Spiritual Model replaces the idea that our world is based on compe-
tition with one that sees relationships as essentially cooperative. In the in-
digenous view, relationships are neither tolerant of nor competitive against
others. Rather, aboriginal people experience themselves as part of others and
see in nature, even in the fiercest struggles, examples of symbiosis, not sur-
vival of the fittest. How this might affect an approach to C.E. in the public
school classroom in contrast to the other two models should be obvious. For
example, by minimizing competitive structures, intrinsic motivation to “do
good” in such ways that individuals might be more likely to develop “good
character” and act accordingly “when no one is looking” is imperative.

Happiness (the Reason for C.E.) Can Be Thought of As
a Gift to or from God
Although this premise ties into the belief that lifelong happiness is the goal
of C.E., I have saved it for last because of its relevance to religion. Because
the connection between religion, spirituality, and C.E. is so pertinent to
public schools, this seems a proper place to conclude the discussion of the
three models.
Aristotle’s reference to God is a foundational contribution to the men-
tality that has placed religious orthodoxy at the top of the hierarchy that
governs morality. For most of America’s history, for example, the Bible has
been the ultimate sourcebook for character education. Throughout the nine-
teenth century and well into the twentieth century, Americans typically saw
obedience to authority, including parental authority, as an expression of
obeying and being reverent to God. The McGuffy Reader served during this
period as our nation’s C.E. textbook. No other book was more read, except
for the King James Version of the Bible. Estimates of 50 to 100 million copies
were sold prior to 1900, and it was used in some schools as late as the
1940s.37 This book represented a heavy-handed approach to moral and re-
ligious instruction. Using an oppressively didactic approach, it touted only
white, middle-class, Protestant values and beliefs.
How much of an effect does Christian religion have on C.E. in public
schools today? As Gordon Vessels states:

In spite of the fact that most religions over the centuries have linked morality
and religious beliefs, few proponents of moral education in the pubic schools
have acknowledged the important role that religions have played in the formu-
lation and transmission of pro-social and pro-environmental values, and the
powerful incentives for moral action that religious beliefs provide for many
people. 38

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Character Education 89

On this point I tend to disagree with my friend and colleague. Although
educators might avoid making direct connections in official conversation
owing to concerns about possible conflicts with multicultural attitudes or first
amendment law, it seems that religious authority continues to dominate C.E.
programs.
Alfie Kohn, for example, criticizes the C.E. movement because of its
Christian affiliations and assumptions. He goes so far as to say that most C.E.
leaders today are Catholics. This is partially why he believes that changing
the structures of education and society is a more vital target for C.E. than
trying to build “character” in individuals, as long as the ideas about indi-
vidual character are about socializing people into relatively dysfunctional
institutions.39
In support of Kohn’s arguments is the fact that in 1999, the U.S. House
of Representatives voted 248 to 180 to post the Ten Commandments in
public schools. This rider was attached to a juvenile justice crime bill. Its
author convinced the legislators that only an improvement in youth moral-
ity could prevent young people from committing violent crimes, and that
“biblical laws are the best source for such a task.”40 A number of states have
passed laws either allowing or mandating that schools post the ten biblical
mandates in all classrooms. Georgia’s House Bill 1207 amended Georgia’s
Quality Basic Education Act to require local school systems to ensure that
the Ten Commandments are displayed in every classroom within the school
district “as a condition for receiving state funds.”41
The connections between organized religion and C.E. have even reached
beyond conservative or counterconservative ideology and into the military–
industrial complex. This should not be surprising because the cross and the
flag have gone hand in hand throughout history. A recent news item shows
how this connection continues. General William G. Boykin, the new Deputy
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, recently made some controver-
sial public comments that, surprisingly or not, have not been chastised by
his superiors in any way. Discussing a battle against a Muslim warlord in
Somalia, he told an audience, “I knew my God was bigger than his.” Refer-
ring to the current occupation of Iraq he said, “We in the army of God have
been raised for such a time as this.” He even said on at least one occasion
that President Bush is in the White House because God put him there.42
Blaming Aristotle for initiating the foundations of a worldview that has
concretized religion into an “us versus them orthodoxy” may seem unfair.43
Yet, Aristotle did axiomize the Platonic rationale for Logos, which was char-
acterized “not only as the ultimate good but also as masculine.”44 Aristotle’s
view that commonsense observations of things exist independent of our in-
terpretations of them, combined with his realist, expert view of character
education, made his reference to happiness and God a disruption of the
holistic worldview of indigenous peoples who maintained the feminine and
the mysterious in their concept of Creation. Power-based interpretations of

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90 Defending Public Schools

Aristotle have too often separated spirit from religion. Nature and the femi-
nine have become things that must be controlled. Whitehead has referred
to this problem we have inherited from Aristotle as a “fallacy of misplaced
concreteness,” or the error of mistaking abstract entities of thought for con-
crete factors of reality.45 The spiritual quest for great questions has been re-
placed by a religious imperative for absolute answers.
Kevin Ryan and Edward Wynne, two of the foremost leaders in the C.E.
field, support this didactic imperative for C.E. as well. They encourage teach-
ers to develop written specific rules of behavior and emphasize obedience
to authority and an honoring of traditional Christian orthodoxies. They, like
Aristotle before them, believe in the requirement for adult autocracy in the
development of character in children, and they oppose arguments for demo-
cratic classrooms in which the students participate more in the creation of
their own character. They and other educators see the rise of humanism and
psychological rationales for degenerate or unethical behavior as having
pushed Christian doctrine to the side. According to authors like James
Davison Hunter, whose book is endorsed by the Josephson Institute
(founders of Character Counts!), character education is an opportunity to
bring the Christian doctrine, with its “Good and Evil” language, back into
our schools. Ryan goes so far as to say our current dire moral condition re-
sults from the loss of virtues that transpired during the tumultuous sixties.46
The Liberal Model’s view of religion tends to honor the many traditional
religious ideas about morality but is critical of the didactic conveyance of
them that inevitably creates competitive conflicts between and amidst ide-
ologies and viewpoints. Its proponents favor situational understandings that
reflect free market capitalism’s contributions to poverty, economic inequity,
and international conflicts and its responsibility for the loss of character,
rather than the Conservative Model’s emphasis on secularism or any such
movement away from religious authority. In other words, it is bad institu-
tions, not bad people, that result in the problems C.E. programs attempt
to address. Religion may or may not be characterized by liberal educators
as an example of a bad institution because, bluntly, this would simply be too
unpopular a position to take.
Leming, however, would point out that both the didactic (Conservative)
and the reflective (Liberal) approaches to C.E., in that both give attention
to individual and community, would likely fail if they resorted to the kind
of exhortations about virtues typically found in religious fundamentalism.
Referring to the 1927 research project by May and Harshorne, showing how
unsuccessful a didactic approach to C.E. can be, he concludes that this ap-
proach does less for making the world a better place than for creating posi-
tive school climates and service-oriented activities.47
The Spiritual Model, as mentioned earlier, is more concerned with the
great mysteriousness of the cosmos, the sacredness of place, and the signifi-
cance of Other than with either religious dogma or secular dogma in the form

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Character Education 91

of psychological or sociological assumptions about service learning or school
climate. When spiritual concerns are operational in a culture, reciprocity
amidst interconnectedness makes harmony the ultimate C.E. principle. “In
all spheres of Indian life, harmony was mandatory—a condition of nature
itself, the resonance of a kind of sanity that predates psychology.”48
Spirituality has no beginning or ending. It is not a rationalization for the
linear conception of progress that undergirds Western beliefs about time and
space. Rather, it “already exists in our consciousness at birth, even before
we participate in life’s various learning experiences. In American Indian cul-
tures, this sacred aspect of the child is nurtured from birth so that the sense
of interconnections colors all of the person’s subsequent learning.”49 Such
a belief about human nature runs counter to that inherited from European
beliefs, which views people as mean, brutish, and selfish. It is also distinct
from the liberal idea that psychological and social interventions are needed
to protect children from social corruptions.
The Spiritual Model leads to a process of maintaining the balance between
generosity and mastery, and between independence and belonging. This
balancing work is on the path to wolokokiapi—a Lakota word for a profound
sense of peace with all things. “Traditional native educational practices ad-
dressed these four bases of self esteem: (1) significance was nurtured in a
cultural milieu that celebrated the universal need for belonging, (2) compe-
tence was insured by guaranteed opportunities for mastery, (3) power was
fostered by encouraging the expression of independence, and (4) virtue was
reflected in the pre-eminent value of generosity.”50

CONCLUSIONS
In comparing and contrasting the three models of C.E., I have not in-
tended to polarize them. No doubt, there are obvious overlaps and similar
intentions across and throughout each. I have, however, attempted to show
a significant difference between the Western models in light of Aristotle’s
legacy and the non-Western, indigenous model, one very close to home (i.e.,
a synthesized theory about the spirituality of American Indian people). If we
expand our anthropocentric view of C.E. in response to our discussion, per-
haps we will learn that the future of C.E. in our public schools exists not
only in human societies but also in our attention to the animal kingdom and
in nature. Consider, for example, such exemplars of virtues as the snake,
demonstrating the virtue of patience as it waits tirelessly for its prey; the
generosity of the wolf raising the pups of an injured member of the pack;
or the courage of the badger standing firm against a cougar. Study the jour-
ney of geese and imagine how we can learn to care for one another as they
do. Watch the struggle of a salmon on its upstream journey and ponder its
model for persistence. Find out about the many symbiotic relationships in
nature and wonder why our institutions believe that competition rather than

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92 Defending Public Schools

cooperation should prevail in the affairs of men and women. Watch the
workings of nature in your backyard and reflect on the possibility that hu-
mans are not the only reasons for the universe and that gentleness and kind-
ness spring from trees and plants as much or more than they do from
humanity.
Sam Keen has written about the virtue of such wildness: “One way to
define modernity is to trace the process by which nature has been desacralized
and God has moved indoors.” He continues,

On an average day, if you stop, look and listen, you will discover phyla of an-
gels bearing messages from the wild. . . . From any of these creatures you may
learn the great spiritual lesson that you are not the center and sole reason for
the existence of the universe. Any squirrel or English sparrow will testify by its
joie de vivre that human ego-centrism and species chauvinism are both a mis-
take and a sin.51

Similarly, Chief Letakots-Lesa said,

In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animals,
for Itirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain
animals to tell men that he showed himself through the beasts and that from
them, and from the stars and the sun and the moon, man should learn.52

If we can begin to understand what this really means in our world today,
then perhaps we will have come full circle in understanding the true nature
of C.E. and how we should be doing it in our contemporary public schools.

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— 7 —

Not the Same Old Thing: Maria
Montessori—A Nontraditional
Approach to Public Schooling
in an Age of Traditionalism
and Standardization
ELIZABETH OBERLE AND KEVIN D. VINSON

The recent history of American public schooling is rife with efforts at re-
form. Especially post-1983’s A Nation At Risk,1 reformers have worked at
an unprecedented pace and scale to create and implement change at a range
of levels and according to a variety of perspectives and worldviews. Their aim?
Ostensibly, the “improvement” of American public schools and classrooms.
Although this, indeed, is a worthy goal, such labors have not been without
their difficulties.
Attempts at reform have occurred at nearly all levels of schooling, cur-
riculum, and instruction, from the national (the No Child Left Behind Act
of 2001) to the state (charter schools, high-stakes testing) and district (to-
tal quality management); from schools (Robert Slavin’s “success for all”) to
grade levels and content areas (the variety of curriculum standards). (Of
course, these distinctions and their relevant reform movements often over-
lap.) If anything, what these various attempts share is their propensity to
generate controversy, to attract both supporters and detractors from across
the politicopedagogical spectrum.2
The purpose of this chapter is to explore one such reform attempt,
namely, the inclusion of Montessori education within the context of public
schools and classrooms. Moreover, we seek to explicate Montessori public
education within the framework of “defending public schools,” especially vis-
à-vis curriculum and instruction. We begin by briefly overviewing Maria
Montessori’s biography and by summarizing the fundamental principles of
her pedagogical approach. We conclude by considering the relationship

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94 Defending Public Schools

between the Montessori methodology and the idea(l) of defending contem-
porary public schools (especially in terms of the curriculum).

WHAT IS MONTESSORI EDUCATION?
AN INTRODUCTION/REVIEW
To the extent that the general public and most public school educators
have even heard of Maria Montessori and Montessori education, what, in
general, do they think? Why? For that matter, what do they think when they
think of contemporary public schools and schooling more broadly?
Although relevant data are difficult to come by, most people who have
heard of Montessori education probably assume that it represents principally
an elite, private school movement—maybe even a movement connected pri-
marily with small, wealthy, religious schools. Although this is not necessarily
an unwarranted assertion, Montessori education involves, of course, far more
than that, both in terms of its aims and commitments and its overall preva-
lence and pedagogical development.

Who Was Maria Montessori?
Maria Montessori was born in Chiaravalle, Italy, in the province of Ancona,
in 1870. Trained as a physician, a scientist—in fact, the first woman licensed
to practice medicine in Italy (graduating from the University of Rome in
1896)—she pursued her lifelong interest in children and how they developed,
learned, and “became human” in terms of constructing their unique person-
alities and identities according to her lifelong belief that children were ac-
tively engaged and intelligent beings. An empiricist, Montessori emphasized
the significance of children’s experiential interactions with their environments
and the necessity of observation as a means of experimentally understand-
ing teaching and learning and their importance relative to schooling and the
evolution of humanity.3
Her work, as represented in such writings as The Absorbent Mind, The
Secret of Childhood, and The Discovery of the Child, drew on her background
in such fields as biology, psychiatry, anthropology, and mathematics.4 Her
unique (at least for the time) research methods emphasized the importance
of empirical techniques (founded in part on the clinical observations she
made as a physician) and strategies in understanding the relationships be-
tween the “general principles” of the development of the human child (across
cultures) and the actualized and critical individuality of specifically existing
human children in their own particular settings. Following her death in 1952
in Noordwijk, Holland, her life and work acquired international renown and
celebrity, not only in terms of pedagogy per se (especially vis-à-vis instruc-
tional methodology, curriculum, and teacher education) but also in such
fields as diplomacy, peace studies, politics, and the sciences.

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Not the Same Old Thing 95

Medical doctor, psychology researcher, early childhood educator, femi-
nist pioneer, and social reformer, all are titles that can describe Montessori
relative to the work she completed during her lifetime. Nearly 100 years later,
her theories on the acquisition of knowledge are still being debated, imple-
mented, and criticized by all sides.
Montessori was raised in a well-educated, conservative family in Italy
during the Victorian era and given a “proper” education for a girl. She
pushed, though, for more and went on to the university (with her father in
tow as chaperone) initially to become an engineer, although she later changed
her emphasis of study to biology, chemistry, and the fledgling field of psy-
chology. Despite the protests of her own family, her professors and admin-
istrators, and her society at large, she completed the requirements to graduate
with a doctorate and took a position at a clinic in Rome assessing potential
patients for an insane asylum. It was during this time that she became fa-
miliar with the works of Jean Gaspard Itard, Antonio Seguin, Johann
Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Froebel was essentially a
contemporary and Sigmund Freud and his wife would later become close
friends of hers. These progressive European men and their views on intelli-
gence, the role of nature and the effects of the environment on learning, and
the belief in all humans’ abilities to engage their society had a profound ef-
fect on Montessori. She translated many of their works into Italian and stud-
ied their positions on “defectives.” (This was a common term used for
persons who were differently-abled. They were classified by their capabili-
ties with equally humiliating words, such as “moron,” “idiot,” etc.) True to
her scientific training, she began a few experiments after observing young
children housed at the insane asylum playing with crumbs and bugs on the
floor of an otherwise barren room. By (at least partially) re-creating the ex-
periments that Itard and Seguin had performed relative to teaching reading,
writing, and basic arithmetic, she was able to help these more or less “for-
gotten” children pass a standard examination for school. This, for all intents
and purposes, set the world on its ear. Here were “cast-off” children who
were in a lock-tight system and who had been able to enter the common
society simply because Montessori had given them the gift of a suitable edu-
cation to meet the demands of the day. This was all well and good, and the
men of the institutions were pleasantly surprised if not startled by this “up-
start” young woman. They challenged her to replicate the effects of her “little
program” with other, so-called “regular” and “normal” children.
A suitable situation was found in Rome: A slumlord who ran a large ten-
ement house was having difficulty with the children of working, single moth-
ers vandalizing his property. As was the common sentiment, the order came
down: “Do something with these children.” Montessori welcomed the chal-
lenge, not necessarily to repeat the performance of the children from the
asylum but as a chance to observe “normal” children in their play activities.
She was a product of her learning, especially in her belief that these children

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96 Defending Public Schools

would and could somehow be different and, therefore, would not necessar-
ily need the same system of teaching but “merely” that it would be inter-
esting to see what the children would be able to do from a scientific
standpoint.
Much has been written by her exceedingly loyal followers, as well as her
detractors, as to those early days in Rome (1905–1909), but clearly the chil-
dren from the slums began using their chalk for writing words and stories,
rather than graffiti, and performing simple mathematical operations, rather
than petty thievery.
When it was published that these children had also passed the standard
tests for entrance into school, people began to take notice. Observers from
many institutions and many countries arrived to observe for themselves what
was happening. Montessori quickly became a name in learned circles and was
invited to speak both in Italy and abroad. In fact, her first lectures in America
were just prior to World War I and not only was she warmly received, but
the first Montessori “societies” and schools were opened. The pressure for
training lay people to teach by her methods was great, and thus she left the
original school (Casa dei Bambini, or Children’s House) in Rome, the oth-
ers that had been opened nearby, and the daily operations of such schools
to her followers so that she could begin the work of explaining her visions
for early childhood education to the rest of the world.
Concentrated in the San Francisco area, the first American Montessori
schools were a novelty, although the schools and training centers in Europe
were well received (many have been in operation since opening in the mid-
1920s). Montessori continued her lectures, her observations, and her
writings, expanding her thoughts to include a stage theory platform of
development. She, like other theorists (Piaget, the most notable) believed
that humans acquired knowledge through certain developmental stages.
Montessori called her stages “planes of development” and felt that there was
a spiral pattern to the mastery of skills and concepts that was built upon sen-
sory input and mental classification and categorization from previous planes
of development.

Montessori Education: Principles, Philosophy, and Practice
The “Montessori Method” developed initially at the first Casa dei Bambini
that Montessori established in 1906 in San Lorenzo in Rome. As with mod-
ern Montessori education, the basic principles were straightforward. First,
Montessori believed that children were innate knowledge seekers and that
they taught themselves. As she expressed it, young learners were “self-cre-
ating.” Second, Montessori believed that, at each stage of development,
education should include and evolve within “prepared environments,” en-
vironments that enabled children to take on accountability for their own
learning as they engaged the processes relevant to becoming able and actu-

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Not the Same Old Thing 97

alized adults and citizens. More specifically, according to the American
Montessori Society (AMS), Montessori’s pedagogy stressed the following
critical and structuring notions:

• The aim of Montessori education is to foster competent, responsible, adaptive
citizens who are lifelong learners and problem solvers;
• Learning occurs in an inquiring, cooperative, nurturing atmosphere. Students
increase their own knowledge through both self- and teacher-initiated experiences;
• Learning takes place through the senses. Students learn by manipulating materi-
als and interacting with others. These meaningful experiences are precursors to
the abstract understanding of ideas;
• The individual is considered as a whole. The physical, emotional, social, aesthetic,
spiritual, and cognitive needs and interests are inseparable and equally important;
[and]
• Respect and caring attitudes for oneself, others, the environment, and all life are
necessary.5

Pedagogically, perhaps the most important, and most famous, emphases
are Montessori’s conceptualizations of the prepared environment and the
developmental plane. According to the Association Montessori Internationale
(AMI, founded by Montessori herself in 1929), the prepared environment
of the Montessori classroom is one

where children are free to respond to their natural tendency to work [and where
their] innate passion[s] for learning [are] encouraged by giving them oppor-
tunities to engage in spontaneous, purposeful activities with the guidance of a
trained adult. [Here, and t]hrough their work, the children develop concen-
tration and joyful self-discipline.] Within a framework of order, [they] progress
at their own pace and rhythm, according to their individual capabilities.6

These are environments that

allow [children] to take responsibility for their own education, giving them the
opportunity to become human beings able to function independently and hence
interdependently.7

From this view, the prepared environment is one that “can be designed
to facilitate maximum independent learning and exploration by the child,”
one in which “there is a variety of activity as well as a great deal of move-
ment.” In this situation, according to the Montessori approach, this “nec-
essary preparedness” enables “children [to] work on activities of their own
choice at their own pace.” Further, “[t]hey [children] experience a blend of
freedom and self-discipline in a place especially designed to meet their de-
velopmental needs.”8
The notion of prepared environment is related, moreover, to the manipu-
lation of learning materials and to the understanding of “normalization.”

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98 Defending Public Schools

From the Montessorian view, materials are to be accessible (e.g., placed on
appropriately high or low shelves) and available for individual student choice,
interest, and use. They are, to a large extent, fully the responsibility of stu-
dents—regardless of age (e.g., students obtain, return, and maintain them).
More pedagogically precise, these materials aim at inducing activity, isolat-
ing a particular learning quality (e.g., comparison and contrast, size, color,
shape, etc.), and inducing self-correctivity (i.e., students can perceive errors
relative to their learning via the materials and correct them without [or with
minimal] adult intervention) and inter-relationality (i.e., that the various
materials [should] build one upon the others).9
Normalization, for Montessori, meant not its typical (or “normal”) defi-
nition of conformity and what “is normal” but, instead, a developmental
process, one inextricably tied to the appropriate preparation of the pedagogi-
cal environment. Montessori observed that children do best in schools (and
education more broadly) given maximal freedom in an environment designed
to meet their unique growth and personal and social needs. Through con-
tinued work with materials that held their interest, selected independently
from within the prepared environment, Montessori noted that children even-
tually acquired an increased sense of satisfaction, self, and inner fulfillment.
The course through which this evolution occurred defined for her the na-
ture and significance of normalization.
As she wrote in The Absorbent Mind:

Only “normalized” children, aided by their environment, show in their subse-
quent development those wonderful powers that we describe: spontaneous dis-
cipline, continuous and happy work, social sentiments of help and sympathy
for others. . . . An interesting piece of work, freely chosen, which has the vir-
tue of inducing concentration rather than fatigue, adds to the child’s energies
and mental capacities, and leads him [or her] to self-mastery. . . . One is tempted
to say that the children are performing spiritual exercises, having found the path
of self-perfectionment and of ascent to the inner heights of the soul.10

As E. M. Standing, in Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work, defined the
characteristics of normalization, they are:

• Love of order
• Love of work
• Spontaneous concentration
• Attachment to reality
• Love of silence and of working alone
• Sublimation of the possessive instinct
• [The p]ower to act from real choice
• Obedience
• Independence and initiative
• Spontaneous self-discipline [and]
• Joy

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Not the Same Old Thing 99

As the North American Montessori Teachers’ Association (NAMTA) says,
“Montessori believed that these are the truly ‘normal’ characteristics of child-
hood, which emerge when children’s developmental needs are met.”11
The idea of developmental plane designates the transitions that occur
during the birth through adulthood evolution of human beings. According
to AMI, the specific planes are:

• Birth to age six: children are sensorial explorers, constructing their intellects by
absorbing every aspect of their environment, their language[,] and their culture;
• Age six to age twelve: children become conceptual explorers[; they] develop their
powers of abstraction and imagination, and apply their knowledge to discover and
expand their worlds further;
• Age twelve to age eighteen: children become humanistic explorers, seeking to
understand their place in society and their opportunity to contribute to it; [and]
• Age eighteen to age twenty-four: as young adults, [individuals] become special-
ized explorers, seeking a niche from which to contribute to universal dialogue.12

More specifically, Montessori classrooms are divided into three-year
groups, the purpose of which, according to Montessori’s theories and ob-
servations, is to facilitate precisely and appropriately the continuum of growth
and learning via human interaction and personal development and explora-
tion, here both in terms of the individual and the social.13 The multi-age
divisions of the Montessori program are (1) parent–infant (ages 0–3), pre-
school (ages 3–6), lower and upper elementary (ages 6–9 and 9–12), and
middle school (ages 12–14). Again, each presents its own precise purposes,
materials, and activities and methodologies.14
And yet, Montessorian curriculum and instruction can be both complex
and multiple, formal as well as unpredictable and less than rigid. Consider
the following applied example:
At the elementary level, the expectations of the learner and the appro-
priate pedagogical principles include:

1. Lesson repetition among students individually, that is after the initial presenta-
tion by the teacher, in order to concretize abstract concepts;
2. Cross-curriculum “webbing”;
3. The view that ability is individual—adults and children work to the potential of
each person, not to the average;
4. Ever-deepening interest on the part of the learner; and
5. The perspective that respect, freedom, and responsibility are interdependent.

Our question, of course, is what these might mean as application.
Lesson repetition implies recurrence and redundancy—not in a negative
way but as individually developed experiences in an effort to habitualize,
routinize, and conceptualize key (especially unfamiliar) ideas, such as, per-
haps, counting and various other mathematical notions. Webbing suggests

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100 Defending Public Schools

that each new idea leads to—and connects with—others, whether presented
earlier or presented later. The individual nature of ability, as opposed to the
“average level of students,” indicates focusing on children moving forward
according to their own singular lesson paces without unwarranted stigmati-
zations and without undue pressure to “track.” The idea of ever-increasing
interest insinuates learners follow their own natural curiosities and inclina-
tions (a la Kilpatrick?), particularly vis-à-vis engaging the essential question
of “why?” Lastly, regarding the case of the interconnectedness of ideas, such
as respect, freedom, and responsibility, Montessori understandings suggest
a relationship among values, culture, growth, success, and maturity, settings
important, ultimately, to both liberal and conservative critics of contempo-
rary American public schooling.

DEFENDING PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND MONTESSORI
EDUCATION
According to NAMTA, well over 200 U.S. public schools are now
Montessori-oriented, a number that continues to grow.15 When viewed
within the context of other contemporary public (though, granted, some-
times private as well) school reform trends (e.g., Waldorf education, char-
ter schools, vouchers, public school choice), the commitment to Montessori
public education seems to support at least two significant points. First, it
represents, to some extent, the present dissatisfaction with “traditional”
public schooling (or at least dominant images of it). Second, it supports the
notion that another way—Montessori, Waldorf, and so on—might provide
and prove to be a better way (especially within the contexts of the No Child
Left Behind Act and standards-based educational reform).
Fundamentally, Montessori education offers but one alternative to the
criticisms leveled at public schools from critics both of the political and peda-
gogical left and the political and pedagogical right. The “standard” right-
wing critique centers on the beliefs that schools today are failing because they
(1) have standards that are too low, (2) replicate the “worthless” theories
and perspectives of the “liberal educational establishment,” (3) maintain a
monopoly, (4) focus on “self-esteem” (and the like) over content, (5) rely
on “progressive methods” at the expense of “direct instruction,” (6) have
privileged “cultural relativism” over “traditional values” and “character,” (7)
have usurped the power and position of parents, and (8) misguidedly “throw
more money” at schools even though this is neither (from this view) a solu-
tion to educational problems nor the answer to educational improvement.16
The standard left-wing critique is that schools fail students because they
(1) stifle freedom and creativity in favor of conformity and discipline, (2)
are dominated by noneducators (e.g., corporations, politicians, managers, test
companies), (3) are too centrally controlled, (4) focus too much on fact-

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Not the Same Old Thing 101

based, standardized content, (5) are too traditional in terms of assessment
and instructional methods, (6) hyperemphasize homogeneity at the expense
of diversity and difference, (7) neglect neighborhoods and local communi-
ties, and (8) are underfunded.17
Conceivably, of course, one could make a case in favor of the truth or
utility of either or both of these critiques (although, indeed, we are more
sympathetic to contemporary left-based criticisms). And, most likely,
Montessori educators and other interested stakeholders probably possess and
espouse a range of viewpoints relative to the overall effectiveness of tradi-
tional public schooling. Yet, what the Montessori approach does is connect
with the concerns many (though not necessarily most) parents have (rightly
or wrongly) that, at least broadly speaking, American public schools are fail-
ing or at least not up to snuff. While our own position is that this is not in-
evitably the case,18 even so, Montessori education provides one appropriate
and legitimate response to dominant modes of public schooling that can be
consistent with a multitude of philosophical, pedagogical, political, and so-
ciocultural goals.
In fact, arguably, Montessorianism takes seriously the apprehensions of the
entire spectrum of educational criticism (relative to official schooling). It
emphasizes, for example, freedom, mastery, diversity, scientific research and
methodologies, formal curriculum, individuality, fairness, planning, and hard
work (among others)—each of which to some extent can meet the demands
of both conservatives and liberals (if not others). That is not to say, of course,
that the Montessori system is perfect—obviously, it is not. Yet, it does fa-
vorably compare with many aspects of more established modes of public
education.
According to NAMTA, the quintessential (and implicitly negative) char-
acteristics of contemporary public school classrooms are their propensities
toward:

• Textbooks, pencil and paper, worksheets and dittos
• Working and learning without emphasis on social development
• Narrow, unit-driven curriculum
• Individual subjects
• Block time, period lessons
• Single-graded classrooms
• Students [who are] passive, quiet, in desks
• Students [who] fit [the] mold of [their] school[s]
• Students [who] leave for special help[, and]
• Product-focused report cards.19

Although, to some, this version of traditional education might seem to
describe perfectly only the conservative agenda, increasingly it can be seen
to characterize what we have called previously the liberal-conservative

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102 Defending Public Schools

consensus and to indicate the current “will-to-standardize” or the “standard-
ization imperative” of both the liberal and conservative “race” to the “middle
of the road.”20
In contrast, NAMTA characterizes the Montessori approach as favoring:

• Prepared kinesthetic materials with incorporated control of error [and] specially
developed reference materials
• Working and learning matched to the social development of the child
• Unified, internationally developed curriculum
• Integrated subjects and learning based on developmental psychology
• Uninterrupted work cycles
• Multi-age classrooms
• [A setting in which students are] active [and] talking, with periods of spontane-
ous quiet [and] freedom to move
• [A setting in which] school[s] meet[] the needs of students
• [A setting in which special] help comes to students[, and]
• Process-focused assessment, skills checklists, [and] mastery benchmarks.21

In effect, Montessori education provides parents and students an alter-
native option within the standard frameworks of public schooling. For those
(generally liberal) critics who believe that traditional public education stifles
freedom, individuality, and creativity, Montessori instruction offers sponta-
neity, choice, and creative student-centeredness. For those (generally con-
servative) critics who believe that public education has been “dumbed down,”
is “anti-knowledge,” and is too “touchy-feely,” Montessori instruction of-
fers hard work, discipline (in the most positive sense), and an emphasis on
fundamental skills.

CONCLUSIONS
Montessori education in the public schools raises a number of questions,
yet it implies, as well, a number of productive and pedagogically sound prin-
ciples and practices.
Some of the difficulties with the historical criticisms of the Montessori
approach include such concerns as immutability versus evolution (i.e., the
extent to which Montessori education changes or the extent to which it
should or must change), “truth” or “universality” (i.e., the degree to which
it implies a structure that can, or does, meet the needs of all individual stu-
dents), and teacher education (i.e., the potential conflict between individual
interpretation, creativity, and independence and individual teacher confor-
mity and disciplinarity). At the extremes, these issues (rightly or wrongly, for
good or bad) weigh heavily on the capacity of the Montessori approach to
meet its educational agendas and its stated purposes.
On the other hand Montessori education represents a little known alter-
native to more traditional modes of public schooling; most members of the

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Not the Same Old Thing 103

citizenry have no idea that such a state of affairs even exists. When most
people think of public schools—their own, their children’s—they think of a
homogeneous setting of traditionalism or of progressivism—either way, the
same setup for everyone. Yet, Montessori education demonstrates the diver-
sity—often little understood, even unknown—that characterizes contempo-
rary teaching and learning. This is most often, we think, quite a good thing.
In any event, it presents the condition of “effective” methods regardless of
one’s political or pedagogical orientation—that is, whether one is conserva-
tive, liberal, reactionary, or radical. There is more going on, that is, then most
people perceive. And, most profoundly, the Montessori effort—the move-
ment—is on the ascendancy.
In the end, with respect to public education, the Montessori philosophy
and its attendant methodologies imply something new, ironically new given
the long and successful history of Maria Montessori’s efforts and influences.
If nothing else, it remains, after all this time, an option worth exploring and
taking seriously. It is a viewpoint that should be reconsidered, reckoned with,
and continuously and rigorously pursued.

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— II —

Critical Issues in Curriculum

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— 8 —

The Military and Corporate
Roots of State-Regulated
Knowledge
STEPHEN C. FLEURY

INTRODUCTION
Over the past decade, many scholar-activists have spoken eloquently about
the dangers and problems of the standards and testing movement that mas-
querades as “educational reform.” Monty Neil, Alfie Kohn, Susan Ohanian,
and other educators have helped bring national attention to the ill effects
of high-stakes testing on everyday instructional and curricular practices, and
on the deleterious social and learning consequences for students. Solid ar-
guments against standardized testing include its negative pressure on effec-
tive instruction and learning, the mismatch of statewide examinations and
standards, and the outright doctoring of test scores by teachers, administra-
tors, and state bureaucrats.1 Amidst the avalanche of attacks on public edu-
cation throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Gerald Bracey annually reported
data-based refutations of the charges in the professional school journal
Kappan.2 Similarly, Berliner and Biddle placed massive amounts of data
within a comprehensive theoretical framework in The Manufactured Crisis:
Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools.3 And Susan
Ohanian’s One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards exemplifies
the work of educators who have railed against the military/industrial/me-
dia complex.4 Unfortunately, contemporary policymakers rarely take educa-
tors seriously in the public forum.
Measured against the full-press whirl and rhetoric of education “account-
ability,” the tone and substance of most criticism appear weak and irrelevant.5

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108 Defending Public Schools

The premises of “standards” and “testing” seem successfully implanted in
the consciousness of our nation’s educators and parents. And, in an eerily
Orwellian fashion, the phrase “equity and excellence” has been repeatedly
chanted by policymakers and testing advocates, deliberately obfuscating the
reactionary meanness of the reforms by couching them in progressive social
rhetoric.6 Similar to the way that rising inflation over time benefits debtors,
the passing of time also benefits policymakers in their imposition of reforms.
Each year, a new crop of teachers replaces a veteran cadre from the pre-
standardized testing era, a historical process that eliminates potential pock-
ets of resistance. In New York State, this demographic shift has been greatly
assisted by hefty early-retirement incentive packages over the past half-dozen
years. Eager to successfully meet expectations in their new position, neophyte
teachers quickly absorb from their teaching and learning environment ex-
pectations that are ultimately defined by their students’ performance on stan-
dardized exams. And, in California, academic freedom has been tossed out
the door as state law now requires university teacher educators to align the
objectives of their courses and programs to state-defined goals.7
Within safe confines (i.e., my graduate curriculum class), many new teach-
ers, some of whom are also parents, vocally espouse their antistandardized
testing position; pragmatically, they accept what they believe to be the real-
ity of testing and their responsibility to their students. Increasingly alarm-
ing, however, is that many of these prospective teachers consider themselves
progressive in fully embracing reforms based on standards and testing. Un-
fettered by a pedagogical memory of inquiry, exploration and divergent
thinking, many new teachers express relief that state standards and objec-
tive tests guide them in knowing what to teach. Their point of view is simply
practical. Despite sophisticated and well-articulated curricula, no document
better identifies the curricular expectations of a school, state, or national
educational system than those systems’ examinations. Viewed negatively by
opponents of testing, the fact that standardized examinations become the
de facto curriculum is an intended outcome of those responsible for legis-
lating their use.
It is dismaying to think that the enthusiastic response of new teachers
results in a form of teaching and knowledge making that fosters in their stu-
dents a pliable obedience to authority and imposition. How we think relates
to how we live, and, considering that the current reform movement rein-
forces an authoritarian and hierarchical organization of knowledge, this re-
lationship should evoke serious action by parents, educators, and anyone else
concerned for the quality of life available for our students.
Arguments supporting standards and testing suffer from a presentism
where accountability and standards are portrayed as an inevitable technical
correction to a system that has academically and culturally deteriorated. A
more careful historical reading would show that the testing and standards
movement punctuates a larger cultural claim about social knowledge. Stan-

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The Military and Corporate Roots of State-Regulated Knowledge 109

dards and testing are not the inevitable solution for improving education,
but the corporate and military roots of curricular knowledge promulgate
these Tayloristic techniques as the sensible response. The purpose of this
chapter is to briefly outline this thinking, incomplete as it is, and explain some
of its implications for students, teachers, and anyone else in society with an
interest in the promotion of democratic thinking.

MILITARIZATION AND CORPORATIZATION DEFINED
The meaning of militarization and corporatization may vary from sim-
ply descriptive terms to highly charged “trigger words.” Used here, milita-
rization refers to the increasing acceptance of absolute authority (i.e.,
authoritarian), bound by the physical force of negative or positive conse-
quences, as the basis of social decision making. Concepts legitimizing au-
thoritarian relationships creep into our consciousness in many ways. For
example, the imposition of standards and the use of standardized tests may
be two such vehicles if neither the students nor the teachers have willingly
collaborated, developed, or executed these social instruments.
Corporatization refers to the increasing abstraction of the locus of deci-
sion making over work and production, organized along authoritarian lines,
and having a narrow, private, utilitarian purpose of increasing the capital of
the “corps” through maximizing profit. In addition, the individuals who
share in the profits and benefits of the corporation enjoy legal protection
from most forms of public accountability (that is, “limited liability” from
everyone outside of the corporate group), aside from whatever responsibil-
ity is due within the corporate structure. A crude analogy pointing out the
civil absurdity of this concept might be the legal inability to hold someone
responsible for taking another’s life with a gun, the defense being that it was
not the whole person (i.e., corp) who pulled the trigger, but rather, the er-
rant behavior of a few of its members (the “arm” and “fingers”).
Thus, since the late 1800s, this purely conceptual abstraction is not only
treated as an empirical entity but enjoys the legal rights of a human being
without most of the social responsibilities. Considering the nonempirical basis
of a “corporation” (Have you ever seen, touched, felt or heard a “corpora-
tion”?) and its powerful influence over people’s behaviors, the idea of cor-
poration may be the secular equivalent of other metaphysical constructs in
the Western world wielding tremendous social influence, for example,
“trinity,” “soul,” and “heaven,” to name a few.8

THE MILITARY AND CORPORATE GENESIS OF
EDUCATIONAL TESTING
In a short paper on The Fascist Roots of the SAT Test, Gibson provides a
concise historical context of standardized testing that goes far beyond what

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110 Defending Public Schools

most students learn in their education programs.9 Alfred Binet’s attempt to
create a measurement of intelligence was used by the United States military
in World War I. Proving efficient to sort and select officers and infantrymen,
the IQ test was soon transformed into a more pervasive social instrument
through a complicitous relationship among education psychologists, military
advisors, and corporate investors. Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes were
instrumental in the military’s original use of the exam, and, as prominent
executives of the American Eugenics Society, continued to promote the idea,
at home and abroad, that intelligence and race are genetically linked. The
promotion of their “scientific” belief was so pervasive by 1929, that at least
thirty states had passed sterilization laws; in California alone, over 6,000
“inferior” people had been sterilized.
The social damage does not end there, for in reviewing the scholarly works
of Stefan Kuhl10 and Barry Mehler,11 Gibson reports:

There is a direct line from the IQ tests, to the American Eugenics Society, to
forced sterilization, to Nazi extermination, a line that extends not only in theory,
but also in History. . . . At their trials at Nuremberg, Nazi scientists not only
pointed to U.S. research as a scientific basis for the death camps, but also rightly
said that after the War, U.S. companies continued to try to recruit them.12

Carl C. Brigham, who assisted Yerkes on the military’s IQ testing pro-
gram, firmly believed that intelligence was biological and that mixing the
races would diminish society’s intelligence. Brigham’s preventative contri-
bution was the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a slight modification of the IQ test.
Reviewing these researchers, Gibson reaches a compelling implication:

The SAT became a deadly weapon. The rationale of racism, sexism, and class
privilege built into the test necessarily means, at its end, not just sterilization,
but death. The SAT was used to secure draft deferments during the Korean
and Vietnam wars, ensuring the wars were fought by working class youth, es-
pecially black youth. . . . Nothing significant has changed about the results of
the SAT scores, or the outlook of its authors since it was first written. Under-
lying the SAT is an equation of lies: Intelligence can be defined and measured,
race is a biological-scientific, not social, construct, some people are simply better
and deserve more, some lives are not worthy of life. There is nothing unto-
ward about pointing at today’s respectable test-promoters and saying: “Fascist.”

Gibson’s frustration with the complicitous misuse of testing as a social
instrument, a misuse now visited upon young children, is understandable.
But perhaps we should not make so much of the assumed connection be-
tween the historic effects of IQ and SAT testing and the, as yet unforeseen,
social effects resulting from standardized testing in today’s schools. Today’s
examinations may be more culturally and psychometrically sophisticated. And
the standardized tests used in today’s schooling measure academic achieve-

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The Military and Corporate Roots of State-Regulated Knowledge 111

ment, not aptitude, as was the purpose of the IQ or SAT test.
Data showing whether today’s examinations are more or less culturally
and psychometrically valid than previously rarely appears in discussions about
the current accountability movement. However, gender adjustments struc-
tured into the SAT and other standardized examinations, and the wholesale
rescaling of the SAT a few years ago, may suggest that endemic test validity
problems are being concealed. Furthermore, Robert Sternberg dispels the
myth that examinations can be sorted into either “achievement” or “apti-
tude” tests. He reasons that any individual responds to test items on the basis
of all previous experience, making it an indicator of what one has cognitively
achieved.13

STANDARDIZING THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE
It is the nature of the content on standardized tests that belie the dan-
gerous military and corporate roots of contemporary educational reforms.
The rise of standardized testing, beginning with the IQ test and later the
SAT, resulted from a confluence of efforts in the early twentieth century in
which American corporations sought greater control over the organization
and production of research knowledge, as well as of workers. With the as-
sistance of the military and the co-opting of universities, corporation efforts
transformed the very nature of knowledge, knowledge that ultimately estab-
lishes the standards for contemporary school subjects.
In the contemporary hierarchy of our social knowledge, math and science
enjoy the highest status.14 Typically the first subjects in K–12 or higher edu-
cation to receive government or industry funding, they are certainly the ones
for which students receive the most lucrative scholarships and grants. David
Noble locates the rise in status of math and science in the early twentieth
century with the research needs of industries. The major corporations—
General Electric, Westinghouse, AT&T, DuPont, General Chemical, and
others—collaborated on a number of fronts to gain control:

First over the means of scientific industry through the establishment and en-
forcement of industrial and scientific standards; second over the products of
scientific industry through the monopoly of patents and reform of the patent
system itself; third over the process of scientific invention and discovery through
the organization of industrial and university research; and finally fourth over
the practitioners of industrial science through transformation of public school-
ing, technical and higher education.15

The emphasis on the control and monopolizing of standards, materials,
and processes of knowledge making reflects the rationality of today’s edu-
cational reforms. Noble explains that the transformation of all social insti-
tutions and the “habituation” of people for “new forms of productive
activity” was a “monumental job.”

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112 Defending Public Schools

Gearing the society for new modes of production—capitalist, corporate, and
scientific—entailed the creation of new forms of social life, individual identity,
relations between people, patterns of work, leisure, consumption, definitions
of human potential, education, knowledge, the good—in short, the produc-
tion of society itself.16

Working through a variety of industry and university collaborations, the
concerted effort on the part of corporations was to (1) shift the burden of
scientific research production from their own private money to the public
money of higher education; (2) influence the type of education workers re-
ceive to make them better prepared for the corporate environment (intelli-
gent, but obedient); (3) utilize modern technologies of standardized testing
for “efficiency” and for “‘scientifically’ fitting the man to the job.”17
The standards and testing strategy of education reform was well honed
at the corporate and university level decades before descending upon K–12
education. The Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education (SPEE)
became the primary forum for changing higher education. Charles Mann,
sponsored by SPEE, introduced testing into the schools in 1914 and advised
industrial employers that not only were objective tests the most efficient in
defining desired worker abilities and in selecting the actual workers, but that
tests are “...your most powerful means of controlling what is done in the
school.”18
Influence over university knowledge by the military was formalized dur-
ing World War I under the auspices of the War Department Committee on
Education and Special Training. The committee, including representatives
from SPEE and from corporations such as Westinghouse and Western Elec-
tric, “all of whom donned uniforms for the duration,” wielded broad au-
thority to “introduce many of their educational innovations with relative ease
while conditioning a good many educators to produce according to specifi-
cations, industrial as well as military.”19 The SPEE remained influential on
the reform of higher education after the war, assisted now by the National
Research Council and the American Council on Education (ACE). Special
note should be taken of the ACE. Its membership “dominated from the
outset by War Department Committee members” promoted the science of
education; its testing program “coalesced eventually into the Educational
Testing Service.”20
The evidence is strong that corporate influence over scientific knowledge
at the beginning of the twentieth century effectively changed our social epis-
temology—what questions are asked, how they are asked, and which ones
will be investigated. Collaborating with the military, U.S. corporations gradu-
ally and deliberately transformed the purposes of universities and colleges into
the production of knowledge and workers befitting a technocratized and
corporatized society. Concurrently, a cultural form of militancy was fostered
by instilling habits of worker efficiency and unquestioning loyalty toward
corporate goals.

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The Military and Corporate Roots of State-Regulated Knowledge 113

SEEKING PARSIMONY (OR “WE HAVE MET THE
ENEMY AND IT IS US!”)
The basis for evaluating theories involves, among its criteria, the degree
to which a theory provides “parsimony,” that is, the simplest, most verifi-
able, and sensible (empirical) explanation of the known information at hand.
For example, aside from its implicitly threatening political implications,
Copernicus’s and Galileo’s explanation of the solar system ultimately was
accepted as superior to Ptolemic theory because it provided a better and sim-
pler account of all the involved phenomena.
The outcome of World War II includes alliances of NATO, SEATO, OAS,
and the United Nations. For many citizens of the United States, another
outcome is an American foreign policy that is often viewed as a tangle of
incomplete doctrines, financial-aid assistance packages, humanitarian initia-
tives, economic trade agreements and military agreements, often with coun-
tries in parts of the world that are unfamiliar until we are told that an
“emergency intervention is necessary.” William Blum, former State Depart-
ment official and editor of the Washington Free Press, offers a parsimonious
foreign policy theory. Spending years publishing exposés of the CIA and the
government’s involvement in various areas of the world, Blum documents
well over sixty-five interventions since World War II, with activities ranging
from the destabilization of opposition parties to outright assassination of
political leaders. In Blum’s words:

It was all called national security. The American republic had been replaced after
World War II by a national security state, answerable to no one, an extra-con-
stitutional government, secret from the American people, exempt from con-
gressional oversight, above the law.21

Blum’s claims may sound absurd to most U.S. citizens, a reaction, per-
haps, that demonstrates the successful indoctrination of our social studies
education programs.22 The enduring patriotic fervor of citizens suggests that
even the least attentive students in school are likely to develop a firm belief
that the United States benignly encourages the growth of democracy around
the world.
In his farewell address fifteen years after World War II, President
Eisenhower warned of the dangers for civil society from the military-indus-
trial complex. Subsequently, reporting on this danger, Sydney Lens explains
that after the war, a permanent war economy was insisted upon, maintaining
a high level of production to meet the stockpiling needs of the military in
their ever-constant vigilance to keep the world safe for—no, not democracy
(although this claim is invoked when convenient), but—free enterprise!23
Who was insisting? It may be possible to imply from Lens’s analysis that
a cabal of military leaders in influential political positions took it upon them-
selves to determine U.S. economic and foreign policy.

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114 Defending Public Schools

[The root of concern for] Truman and the military men who ran his State
Department was the issue of “free” versus “regimented” economies. The So-
viet orbit’s own economy was “regimented,” and if the new nations—whose
revolutions were supported by the Soviets—were to become similarly “regi-
mented,” American free enterprise would find a large area of the world closed
off to its trade and investment, as well as its needs in raw materials. (Italics
mine)24

The social studies curricula of U.S. schools typically frame the Cold War
in terms of “totalitarian” versus “democratic” systems, a polarization that
habituates alarm among students who learn to fear the impending loss of
their individual, personal freedom. Yet, a closer examination of Cold War
activities might suggest that the primary concern was for the freedom of U.S.
industries to expand globally. Protecting the freedoms of U.S. citizens may
have been a secondary benefit of Cold War policy, as was the freedom of
citizens of other nations (ask a Vietnamese or Cuban).
Consistent with this parsimonious thinking, world domination may not
be stretching the purpose and trajectory of U.S. foreign policy since World
War II. Shortly after becoming president, Truman explained to a friend that
“once the Russians are shown their place,” the United States would run the
world the way “the world ought to be run.”25 In a subsequent speech at
Baylor University, which Lens feels should have been given more attention,
Truman reflected the Cold War ideology of the United States:

The enemy of free enterprises was “regimented economies,” and “unless we
act, and act decisively,” said Truman, those regimented economies would be-
come “the pattern of the next century.” To guard against the danger he urged
that “the whole world should adopt the American system.” That system “could
survive in American only if it became a world system.”26

An adamant determination to procure and protect ever-expanding glo-
bal markets and resources for our industries provides a parsimonious account
of U.S. foreign policy. Regardless of variations in foreign policy emphases
by different administrations and Congresses since WWII, the underlying
premises guiding foreign policy emerged from the lessons of the Great De-
pression and World War II, keenly learned and persistently promoted by the
industrial and military sector.

MAKING THE SCHOOLS SAFE FOR GLOBALIZATION
A highly esteemed colleague once remarked that “many conservative edu-
cational critics blame school failures on John Dewey and the Progressives,
but Fredrick Taylor has had the most influence on the way schools are
shaped.”

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The Military and Corporate Roots of State-Regulated Knowledge 115

Taylor’s ideas about industrial organizational management, an authoritar-
ian system of standards, efficiency, and accountability has trivialized most of
the developmental and progressive educational ideas of the past century.
Deeply engrained Tayloristic principles continue to provide a bulwark against
the social meliorist effects of civil rights legislation. In the Sputnik-instigated
Cold War educational crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, only reform principles
consistent with entrenched Tayloristic behaviors endured. War Department
and National Science Foundation funding supported subject matter experts
(especially in the sciences and mathematics) who identified the most impor-
tant concepts of their fields—a technocratic act that reified knowledge and
trivialized the new pedagogy of student inquiry into a linear process for the
“discovery” of preexisting knowledge. Evaluations of what came to be called
the “new education” blame its failure on insufficient professional develop-
ment, that is, inadequate resources devoted to resocializing how teachers
think.27 Further complicating the new education efforts were the changes
brought upon the schools from civil rights legislation.
As Secretary of Education for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, William
Bennett called from the bully pulpit for an education founded on Charac-
ter, Content, and Choice (The “Three Cs”), assuring cultural conservatives
that educational reform would bring order to a chaotically changing social
structure. It also signaled that Tayloristic principles for organizing and con-
trolling teaching and learning would again predominate educational policies
and practices.
The authoritarian tone and militant language of A Nation At Risk signaled
that the purpose of education reform in the 1980s would be no less than
preparation for globalized, industrialized, and, if necessary, military compe-
tition.28 A forceful political strategy of deregulation followed, creating sig-
nificant long-term changes in the direction of federal educational policy.29
Three national education forums have been held since 1989 to continually
enforce the corporate shape of education reform. These national reforms,
including among its main cosponsors the Business Roundtable and the Na-
tional Alliance of Business, continue to include a raft of cultural conserva-
tives (e.g., Chester Finn is a regular) and increasingly involve more CEOs
and highly selected educational politicians but fewer governors.
The Third National Summit on Education was held at IBM headquar-
ters in White Plains, behind locked gates and with restrictions on public ac-
cess and news media. According to Joy Wallace, one of the few reporters
allowed to attend its proceedings, the urgent theme of the summit was that
state governors and commissioners of education needed to improve achieve-
ment, or else! Wallace interpreted that “or else” to mean a turn to
privatization, vouchers, and charter schools. And the only means implied to
accomplish these demands was to “press forward” with standards and test-
ing.30

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116 Defending Public Schools

The brazen tone of the Third Summit fortified many of the educational
politicians in attendance. For example, having recently returned from the
summit, New York State Commissioner Richard Mills warned a roomful of
education deans and chairs of teacher preparation departments that, unlike
the resistance and strikes in other states by parents, teachers and educators,
the standards and testing movement in New York State would involve “no
nonsense!” In the mesmerizing voice of an evangelist and rhythmically tap-
ping his fist on the podium, he proclaimed, “this—will—not—happen—
here!” True belief? Bravado? Fear? One might wonder what creates such
self-assured confidence, but for anyone present in the room, there was little
doubt that Commissioner Mills was deeply committed to the themes of the
Third National Education Summit.
For well over a century, New York State parents, teachers, students, and
administrators have accepted—even embraced—standardized State Regents’
examinations and regulations, so it is reasonable to think that the culture of
New York State would be amenable to the increased intensity of high-stakes
testing and standards. Yet, public resistance against high-stakes testing and
standards arose rapidly in various quarters, and has evolved into effective
legislative actions. Only a few months after Commissioner Mills denied the
possibility of opposition, over two-thirds of eighth-grade students in the
prosperous Scarsdale, New York, district boycotted a state standardized test,
as did students from Ithaca and Rochester. Around the same time, parents,
teachers, administrators, and students “marched on the State Education
Building in Albany and held a boisterous rally on the Capitol steps—the larg-
est protest seen in the Capitol this year.”31 Resistance grew in the next two
years as more parents and teachers became aware of the insidious and skewed
effects of high-stakes testing.32 The Rouge Forum,33 Teachers Forum, The
Coalition for Commonsense in Education,34 the New York Performance
Standards Consortium (representing twenty–eight districts), and Time Out
From Testing35 are but some of the groups of widely diverse members who
sponsor resistance activities, testify at public hearings on the bias of testing,
initiate and support legislative actions, maintain active websites and consis-
tently document the case against New York State’s current regulation of
knowledge.

STATE REGULATION OF KNOWLEDGE
Stopping short of labeling the influence of the CEOs and politicians at
the Third Education Summit a fascist conspiracy, it is important to note that
federal and state education policies (policies that critics argue are racist, ar-
rogant, and overly nationalistic) were formed in a mostly closed meeting
between corporate leaders and the selected politicians who would most likely
heed their requests.

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The Military and Corporate Roots of State-Regulated Knowledge 117

The apparent change in nature between the First National Education
Summit in the 1980s and the Third National Education Summit in 1999
exemplify that the state regulation of knowledge is not a static formulation
or a fixed authoritarian force. The First Summit involved a great deal of dis-
cussion among forty-nine state governors, and what emerged were recom-
mendations for some far-reaching goals about literacy and student knowledge
by the year 2000. The Third Summit involved about half as many gover-
nors, but the threatening stridency of its theme, the preponderance of CEO
attendees, and the confidence of its leaders in demanding that their recom-
mendations be put into effect indicate the hegemonic influence corporate
America developed over educational policy in a little over a decade.
This is not a time for progressive-minded citizens to be discouraged.
Michael Apple reminds us that the “State” is neither fixed nor simple, but
has a constantly changing role as different interest groups struggle for in-
fluence.36 Understanding the hegemonic nature of the testing and standards
policies, and recognizing that hegemony is a process in which power has to
be constantly built and rebuilt, enables educators and other citizens to ask
questions and become a counterhegemonic force.

A ROLE FOR EDUCATORS
Apple writes that “education is thoroughly political” and that “in order
to defend the more democratic gains that committed educators and activ-
ists have won in many nations over the years, we need to act collectively.”37
Indeed, we need the work of Ohanian, Berliner, Biddle, and others to con-
tinue, even when the odds of directly influencing public policy seem over-
whelming. Susan Ohanian advises that we might best “fight city hall” by
talking and by getting our students to talk—and by influencing them to keep
their students talking. Over the past twenty years, policymakers have con-
spicuously ignored and avoided the inclusion of educators in their quest for
reforms via standards and testing. It is also glaringly apparent that these same
policymakers are seriously concerned about what educators teach in the class-
room.38 Perhaps they are concerned for good reason, because educators,
especially those of us in higher education, are in the “belly of the beast.”
We work in institutions that are instrumental for the production and repro-
duction of capital and capitalism—one reason why corporations and the
military have attempted to control it since the early twentieth century. But,
while colleges and universities share responsibility with other social institu-
tions in creating wide disparities between the haves and the have-nots, higher-
educators are also in the position to promote social justice and are ultimately
responsible for providing an education that is personally liberating and so-
cially progressive. College graduates are likely to assume positions of power,
and their knowledge and social disposition will greatly affect our children’s

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118 Defending Public Schools

movement toward or away from democratic living. An uplifting view is that
educators can redefine the direction of educational reform and can develop
citizens and teachers of citizens who are able to rise above the constraints
of corporatized and militarized thinking.
Toward this noble end, it is important to encourage students toward a
better understanding and disposition about knowledge. What one under-
stands about knowledge and how one learns to be disposed to knowledge is a
foundational area for liberating the thinking of teachers, students, and, ulti-
mately, citizens for a democratic society. This is not a proposal for yet an-
other technocratic form of critical thinking but rather a serious reminder that
the liberating aspect of teaching and learning is not a matter of testing and
standards but, instead, involves coming to the realization that what people
think they know is, at best, contingent and ever-changing, value-laden, and
inextricably related to how they live in the world.

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— 9 —

Extreme Takeover: Corporate
Control of the Cirriculum,
with Special Attention to the
Case of Reading
STEVEN L. STRAUSS

INTRODUCTION: CORPORATE AMERICA’S INTEREST
IN CURRICULUM
The last decade or so of education reform has been primarily about the tran-
sition from corporate influence over classroom curriculum to corporate con-
trol. This is especially true in the field of reading, where the question of
corporate influence has never really been in doubt but where teachers, stu-
dents, and parents are just now beginning to grapple with the consequences
of control.
Corporate influence over the reading curriculum is easy to detect each time
a child sounds out a letter from a decodable primer, writes in a phonics
workbook, or takes a quantitative reading assessment examination. The phon-
ics industry showcases these wares at teacher and educator conferences, as
if such conferences were mere trade shows. The materials are colorfully pack-
aged and slickly marketed, the better to attract the eye of the one who comes
bearing a school district’s blank check.
A new era of outside control over the reading curriculum can now be
detected, quite easily in fact, with the unprecedented legal requirement that
teachers drill children in intensive phonics, whether they need it or not and
whether teachers believe in intensive phonics or not, using only approved
materials, under the threat of sanctions against both teachers and students
for failing to make “adequate yearly progress.” These measures are codified
in President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the

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120 Defending Public Schools

successor to Clinton’s Reading Excellence Act. The latter mandated only
phonics, without yet imposing high-stakes testing and accountability pun-
ishments, whereas Bush’s bill simply tightens the screws already set in place
by his predecessor.
The chief architect of the new pedagogy is corporate America, which has
united around an education policy articulated primarily by the Business
Roundtable, a coalition of CEOs of the country’s leading corporations. Over
the past fifteen years or so, the Business Roundtable has agitated success-
fully in favor of standardizing the school curriculum nationwide and impos-
ing high-stakes testing and punitive accountability. Its goal has been “not
just to improve individual schools but to reform the entire system of public
education.”1 It is well on its way to achieving its goal.
To corporate America, the era of mere influence over curriculum, as op-
posed to complete control over it, has become unacceptable. This is because
classroom curriculum holds the key to something that corporate America now
feels is indispensable to its very survival as a global hegemonic class. When
properly engineered, classroom curriculum can create workers with world-
class skills in information technology and digital literacy. According to the
Business Roundtable, “investment in workforce training and skills upgrad-
ing is an urgent priority for U.S. competitiveness. In the integrated global
economy, workforce quality drives national competitiveness. . . . The struc-
tural transformation of the American economy demands a substantial im-
provement in the training and development of the U.S. workforce.”2
It is precisely the skills of digital, electronic literacy, to be drilled into the
emerging U.S. domestic labor force of the twenty–first century, that the
Business Roundtable is counting on to maintain the global competitive edge
of its corporations. For its part, and in intimate collaboration with corpo-
rate America, government scientists have offered up intensive phonics as the
key to setting future workers on the path to digital literacy.
Indeed, the politicoeconomic driving force behind the government’s read-
ing research was stated quite succinctly by Duane Alexander, director of the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). On
presenting the report of the NICHD’s National Reading Panel to Congress,
Alexander declared, “the significance of these findings for the well-being of
our children and their families and teachers, and the implications for the
future literacy of this nation and for the economic prosperity and global
competitiveness of our people is enormous.”3 And to complete the circuit
of coercive pedagogy in the service of corporate America, Reid Lyon, director
of the NICHD’s reading research branch, testified before Congress in favor
of tying the NRP’s intensive phonics recommendations to high-stakes test-
ing and accountability.4
It is interesting that Lyon has repeatedly defended intensive phonics on
the basis of its alleged scientific support. But he provided not a single piece
of evidence that high-stakes testing and punitive accountability improve edu-

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Extreme Takeover 121

cational performance or that they do so without undue harm to children.
His testimony, therefore, was politically inspired and antiscientific.
Corporate America sees its strongest and most worrisome competition
coming from corporate Europe and corporate Asia. According to Norman
Augustine, “We are concerned that the graduates of America’s schools are
not prepared to meet the challenges posed by global economic competi-
tion.”5 Augustine is the former CEO of Lockheed Martin, former chair of
the Education Task Force of the Business Roundtable, and education advi-
sor to President Bush.
In order to beat back the challenge, corporate America has concluded that
it must train and maintain a domestic workforce with the world’s most ad-
vanced level of labor productivity. In the age of the technological revolu-
tion in electronics, this translates into creating workers who possess the most
advanced levels of fluency in reading and writing the literature of software
and hardware, a labor skill that can be called e-fluency.
Various corporate-friendly research and policy organizations have looked
into the prerequisite, component skills of e-fluency. In its 2000 report, the
Congressional Twenty-first Century Workforce Commission, set up by Presi-
dent Clinton, identified reading and mathematics as foundational to e-
fluency.6 The commission’s director, Clinton-appointee Hans Meeder,
encouraged schools to implement the intensive phonics curriculum recom-
mended and promoted by the NICHD in its NRP Report. Meeder had pre-
viously worked for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on
Education and the Workforce. He is currently an assistant Secretary of Edu-
cation under Rod Paige and President Bush. Meeder has no academic back-
ground in education.
The Business Roundtable has taken on the job of promoting corporate
America’s education reform scheme to manufacture a workforce drenched
in twenty-first century literacy. In order to make certain that schools would
implement the “tough academic standards” demanded by corporate America,
the Business Roundtable urged lawmakers to write legislation mandating
regular testing in reading and mathematics, and in order to make certain that
teachers and students would take the tests seriously, lawmakers were further
urged to tie the test scores to “rewards for success and consequences for
failure.”7
To ensure popular support for this extreme takeover, a new pedagogical
language had to be circulated and popularized. Reading and mathematics
have been incessantly referred to as the new “standards,” as if there were
something substandard about art, music, and physical education. Measur-
able growth in the acquisition of knowledge labor skills is called “adequate
yearly progress.” Opponents of the scheme are cynically accused of harbor-
ing “the soft racism of low expectations.”
The language of corporate coercion is supplemented, of course, with
material coercion. The prospect of a high-paying job in the digital economy

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122 Defending Public Schools

is held out as bait for a student who does well in the new curriculum, but,
as usual, this is nowhere guaranteed. Negative incentives include the threats
of retention and withholding of diplomas, and in some states, the local busi-
ness community has announced that it will routinely look at a job applicants’
high school transcripts.8
Though corporate America describes the new twenty-first century digital
literacy as a labor skill that goes beyond the skills needed in the era of the
twentieth-century industrial worker, its model of the educational organiza-
tion needed to create the next generations of knowledge workers is just the
same old industrial assembly line. It has been quite explicit about this.
For example, corporate America has justified its right to decide on mat-
ters of education and curriculum on the grounds that it is “the principle
customer of the products of the education pipeline.”9 Indeed, it refers to
schools as “a workforce development system that will serve its principal cus-
tomers,” where high school graduates are merely the final, finished prod-
ucts to be purchased as commodities on the labor market.10
The manufacture of this commodity proceeds via a sequence of steps called
“curriculum,” beginning, as does any manufacturing process, with raw ma-
terials and the machines to process them. In the workforce development
system, these are fresh young minds and dutiful, compliant teachers, respec-
tively. The teachers, living tools in the assembly line process, sculpt and mold
the children, the living raw material, beginning with the inculcation of el-
ementary skills, proceeding to successively more complex skills.
As with any assembly line process, quality control mechanisms must be
in place to weed out products of poor quality. This is one of the functions
of high-stakes testing and accountability. Its other function, of course, is to
let products of acceptable quality proceed to the next stage in the manufac-
turing process, that is, to be promoted and to graduate.
In assembly line manufacturing, products of poor quality, along with waste
products of the manufacturing process, undergo two possible fates. They are
either discarded or alternative uses are found for them. One of the chief
educational landfills where flawed products can be discarded is prison, whose
construction is on the rise and whose residents typically include students who
don’t make it, as the National Institute of Child Health and Human Devel-
opment has acknowledged. A major alternative use for flawed products is
anticipated in the No Child Left Behind Act. The bill includes a little pub-
licized section that permits the Pentagon greater access to student names and
addresses, for recruitment purposes of course, an alternative use of partially
educated material but one that is particularly crucial in the current era of
“endless war.”
The sheer size of the new workforce corporate America wants, as well as
the anticipation that it will be needed for decades to come, defies corporate
America’s willingness to take full responsibility for its own perceived needs.

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Extreme Takeover 123

From its selfish perspective, it is much more efficient, and less damaging to
profit margins, if the public schools do the job training as a matter of offi-
cial curriculum. In return, corporate America offers nothing to young people
and their parents other than the possibility of getting a good job. Thus, this
entire project represents the kidnapping of public schools and the looting
of public coffers by corporate America for its own ends.
A bipartisan Congress has all along been a willing accomplice in this grand
theft. Its contribution has been No Child Left Behind, the legal basis for
corporate America’s invasion of the classroom, analogous to providing a
president with a declaration of war. Sadly, this is not just metaphor. As
Norman Augustine explained, “Competition in the international marketplace
is, in reality, a battle for the classroom.”11
Thus, children are not only raw material to be molded by a workforce-
development system into knowledge workers, they are also cannon fodder
in a global war for control of markets. No Child Left Behind is, fundamen-
tally, a law whose function is to conscript the entire educational system, in-
cluding its administrators, teachers, and students, and transform it into
factories for the war effort. Those students who succeed will fight on the
domestic front, while those who are picked off by the Pentagon will fight
in foreign countries, all part of the same war.
The media has done its part as well. It has popularized the unfounded
notion that we are living in the midst of a literacy crisis, one that requires
an urgent solution, or else—or else what? It has covered up the fact that the
supposed literacy crisis is corporate America’s own problem, that it needs a
certain type of literacy among its workforce to maintain a hegemonic lead in
labor productivity. It has never seriously publicized the fact that private
schools for children of wealthy corporate CEOs will not be subject to No
Child Left Behind, so they will be free to offer an educationally rich cur-
riculum that does not shortchange the arts, music, and physical education.
Clearly, these schools develop the nation’s future rulers, while the public
schools, under the guise of educational standards, develop the nation’s fu-
ture workers.
The scientific community has furnished the “objective” cover for No Child
Left Behind. For example, the report of the National Reading Panel pre-
sented the findings of a meta-analysis of selected instructional techniques in
reading, but the section on phonics looked at a scant thirty-eight articles,
all that the National Reading Panel could find from the entire worldwide
English-language database on phonics intervention spanning a period of
nearly three decades. One of the “technical advisors” to the National Read-
ing Panel, Barbara Foorman, was herself an author of more than 10 percent
of the articles in the phonics section, so in this capacity, the National Read-
ing Panel violated the crucial anonymity condition of any legitimate meta-
analysis. Protecting itself against conflict of interest was hardly taken seriously

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124 Defending Public Schools

anyway. The mass-distributed summary report of the NRP was prepared with
the assistance of Widmeyer-Baker, a public relations firm contracted to
McGraw-Hill, a major manufacturer of phonics materials.
Barbara Foorman has acknowledged that any reader of the summary re-
port who does not also read the lengthy full report will be “misinformed,”
but this warning appears nowhere in the report itself.12 The most striking
piece of misinformation is the assertion of the summary report that the ben-
efits of phonics instruction persist through all the elementary school grades,
while the full report asserts that there is no evidence of any benefit beyond
first grade.13 Of course, it is the lightweight, thirty-five page summary re-
port that is the primary promotional tool for “research-based” reading in-
struction.
The scandal of the National Reading Panel report has drawn no objec-
tion from corporate America. Apparently, it trusts the panel’s motives and
is willing to let intensive phonics be the method of choice to initiate chil-
dren into workforce development. Indeed, corporate America has backed off
on recommending any particular instructional method, especially in reading,
stating that the field is to too complex, and is content, for the time being,
to leave the details to its paid experts.14
But intensive phonics will fail, since it is a demonstrably defective para-
digm for understanding reading development, instruction, and assessment.
Nearly forty years of research on how children construct meaning in their
interaction with print has clearly shown that letter-sound relationships are
just one of a number of cognitive resources the reader uses and that it is no
more privileged in this role than knowledge of syntactic structures, seman-
tic systems, and background knowledge and beliefs.15
Thus, we can anticipate a sharpening conflict between corporate America
and the scientific community in the years to come. However the details of
this conflict work themselves out, one thing is absolutely certain, corporate
America will demand the same control over publicly funded scientific research
that it now demands over publicly funded classrooms.
The battle for the classroom is only just beginning.

THE ROLE OF PHONICS IN THE “BATTLE FOR
THE CLASSROOM”
Phonics focuses on very little things, like letters of the alphabet and the
phonemes they allegedly correspond to. Globalization and economic hege-
mony focus on very big things, like the world’s markets, oil, and the World
Trade Organization. As expressed through this rather banal and jejune con-
trast, the two seem to have absolutely nothing to do with one another.
However, their bedroom intimacy has already been noted, and further ele-
ments of their tabloid relationship need to be examined.

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Wherever the Business Roundtable and the National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development first met, they now hang out together in
Bush’s Education Advisory Committee. Members of this committee include
Ed Rust, Jr., CEO of State Farm Insurance Companies, and former head of
the Education Task Force of the Business Roundtable; Norman Augustine,
already identified as former CEO of Lockheed Martin and former head of
the Education Task Force of the Business Roundtable; and Reid Lyon, di-
rector of reading research at the National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development and one of the chief architects of No Child Left Be-
hind. Rust and Augustine have bought Lyon’s intensive phonics, and Lyon,
the erstwhile stumper for “trustworthy” science, has bought Rust’s and
Augustine’s demand for high-stakes testing and accountability (for which
absolutely no supportive scientific evidence exists whatsoever) that it will
improve educational achievement without unacceptable side effects.
Obviously, this is far from the first time that scientists have colluded with
those in power. We often think of such collusion as characteristic of totali-
tarian societies. Medical doctors did “research” for the Nazis, and biologists
in Germany twisted Mendelian genetics to buttress racial superiority “theo-
ries,” taking their cue, in fact, from the U.S. eugenics movement. Stalin
outlawed Mendelian genetics as a “fascist” and “Trotskyite” aberration, and
gave state approval, including funding and research facilities, to the idiotic
agricultural theory of Trofim Lysenko, whose antigenetics vernalization
theory was a snake-oil promise to bring the Soviet Union out of its famine.
Lysenkoism eventually was repudiated, in part due to the courageous work
of Soviet dissident scientists.
It is relatively easy to understand why some scientists would acquiesce to
the state. It is simply not possible for most scientists to pursue their work
without substantial, independent funding. They are, indeed, dependent in
this respect on outside sources of material support. Their love for their work,
and perhaps even a strong dose of denial, can overcome otherwise objec-
tionable government policy. Some, of course, support the political goals of
the state.
But the question of why phonics would resonate with the corporate busi-
ness community is a different matter. Mere respect for science itself does not
explain the Business Roundtable’s acceptance of intensive phonics, since there
are other scientific conceptions of reading and reading instruction that could
also have competed for the ears of Rust and Augustine. The answer must
lie in the perceived capacity of intensive phonics to achieve corporate
America’s goals. In this, intensive phonics is practically ideal.
Corporate America’s ultimate goal for education is to turn it into a
workforce development system to construct a labor force that has facility with
digital technology, electronic databases, fiber optics, and, more generally, with
the whole field of information processing. Viewed conceptually, phonics can

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126 Defending Public Schools

be thought of as the most elementary form of information processing of
written symbols. Each letter is the smallest functioning unit on a printed
page. Decoding the letter to discover the sound it is connected to is a form
of data manipulation. Joining successive sounds together into a word is a
higher level of data manipulation. Joining words together into phrases and
sentences leads ultimately to the construction of meaning itself.
Intensive phonics is couched in a theory of reading that regards word
identification as the crucial, fundamental psychological operation. This is
achieved via identification of the word’s component sounds, themselves iden-
tified by using phonics rules to connect the word’s letters to their correspond-
ing pronunciations. The measures of word identification that supposedly
characterize a proficient reader are speed and accuracy. These are quantifi-
able measures and, therefore, lend themselves readily to quantitative testing
and serial monitoring. In turn, these measures can enter into the calculations
that decide whether a school has made “adequate yearly progress.”
In all these respects, intensive phonics is an appealing pedagogy to cor-
porate America, because it promises to create well-trained data manipulators
and can be monitored quantitatively. Thus, it ideally ties together a plan for
manufacturing an e-literate workforce with high-stakes testing and account-
ability.
In all these areas, intensive phonics is diametrically at odds with mean-
ing-centered reading, or whole language. According to advocates of the latter
reading paradigm, several decades of scientific research on how readers con-
struct meaning have clearly demonstrated that letter-sound relationships play
a distinctly ancillary and subordinate role when compared with the role of
syntax, semantics, world knowledge, and belief systems. In reading the sen-
tence “Chopin played the piano,” knowledge that Chopin was a piano player
and that “the” is syntactically followed by a noun already narrows down the
possibilities for the identification of the last word. It is much more efficient
to predict that the final word is “piano,” perhaps even scanning just the first
letter “p” for some additional confirmation (without necessarily sounding
it out), than to sound out each individual letter, put them all together, and
then suddenly realize that the word is “piano.” Whole language researchers
have been able to show, in fact, that proficient readers process written text
on the basis of such predictions, using a variety of resources to narrow down
the possibilities, and to improve their chances of being semantically right.
It is precisely the efficiency of good predictions that makes good readers read
fast and the laboriousness of sounding out letters that makes poor readers
read slowly.
Thus, whole language is interested in meaning construction rather than
data manipulation. It emphasizes the open-endedness of interpretations
rather than the accurate and speedy identification of words and, therefore,
assesses reading qualitatively, not quantitatively. It is not an intrinsically

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Extreme Takeover 127

appealing approach to reading instruction for advocates of the workforce-
development system.
Unfortunately for such advocates, however, whole language has won the
support of vast numbers of teachers over the past several decades because
of its sturdy scientific foundations and because teachers have been able to
see for themselves that real readers, both proficient and nonproficient, re-
ally do what whole language theorists claim. Good readers use a variety of
“cuing systems” to construct meaning, while poor readers overemphasize
letter-sound relationships.
Of course, many teachers support the use of phonics and do not agree
with whole language. But this is precisely what should be expected among
professionals, where it is recognized that judging the needs of an individual
child is based, in part, on a teacher’s expertise. Therefore, it is not just ad-
vocates of whole language who will find themselves on the enemies list of
the corporate agenda but also those democratic-minded phonics advocates
who believe that using phonics should be a matter of individual choice, based
on expert assessment of a child’s needs, ideally in collaboration with the child
and the child’s parents.
Interestingly, it is the most enlightened proponents of whole language who
advocate for democratic classrooms and for freedom of choice on the part
of professional teachers. This is because whole language recognizes the in-
dividuality of interpretation, the crucial role that critical thinking plays in
nurturing this, and the necessity for classrooms to be democratic if critical
thinking is to be promoted.
Leaders of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), an or-
ganization of seventy thousand teachers and educators, are among these
enlightened thinkers. NCTE has published two relevant position papers on
these matters.16 In its Position Statement On Reading, NCTE describes read-
ing as the process of constructing meaning from print, using the full comple-
ment of psychological resources available to the reader, including syntax,
semantics, world knowledge, belief systems, and letter-sound relationships.
In the other statement, it opposes the government issuing any “official”
definition of reading or science, such as that which appears in Clinton’s
Reading Excellence Act and Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act.
Therefore, in order for corporate America’s agenda to become a reality,
a battle must be waged against sizeable forces of resistance, among whom
are whole language teachers and phonics teachers who believe in democracy
in the classroom. This is Augustine’s “battle for the classroom.”
Intensive phonics identifies for corporate America one of its main enemies
in this battle, namely, the paradigm of meaning-centered whole language to
which it is counterposed, while high-stakes testing and accountability pro-
vide the means to eradicate the enemy from the classroom. The appeal of
intensive phonics to advocates of the workforce development system is that

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128 Defending Public Schools

it can attack whole language at the micro level, decrying its “unscientific”
sloppiness in allowing young readers to merely predict words rather than
getting them right every time. But this attack is a decoy for the real goal,
which is to eliminate what whole language champions at a macro level,
namely, democratic classrooms and critical thinking. Clearly, if classrooms are
democratic, someone might propose that curriculum should be more than
just vocational training.
So, over the past decade, the government has enabled scientists associ-
ated with the NICHD to point intellectual turrets at the microcharacteristics
of whole language. As opposed to the principles of whole language, these
scientists claim that letter-sound decoding is the fundamental element of
reading. They claim, incredibly, that readers do not use context when read-
ing. They boast scientific evidence from a major medical-model meta-analysis
of instructional techniques. They show pictures taken with high-tech func-
tional magnetic resonance imaging cameras that identify where in the brain
phonological decoding occurs. The message that phonological decoding is
supported by the most trustworthy science has been played over and over
again in the print and broadcast media, so much so that phonics has become
a household term.
But in targeting the micro aspects of whole language, and in building
support for its elimination from the classroom, the macro aspects of whole
language are displaced as well. Of course, the media has not played up this
aspect of the attack. But in creating an educational refugee out of whole lan-
guage, outside control moves in.
An ideology of control greases the skids for high-stakes testing and ac-
countability. It promotes the notion of “standards” without public debate,
thus allowing the most powerful social groups to define what constitutes
standards. In the end, these will be whatever is thought to promote their
own self-serving interests.
Therefore, even if intensive phonics proves to be a big bust, and even if
corporate America does not see digital literacy advancing at a pace it feels
comfortable with, the present focus on intensive phonics will still have
achieved one crucial goal: The government has been allowed into the class-
room, and coercive pedagogy has been legally sanctioned. Teachers and stu-
dents will be told what to do and what standards they need to adhere to.
Whether it is phonics that the government uses to promote mastery of cor-
porate-defined standards or some other pseudoscience, the command and
control center has been established.
But phonics will fail as surely as every other snake oil fails, as surely, for
example, as the pseudoscience of Lysenkoist vernalization failed when Stalin
and his cronies demanded that scientists come up with a cure for their agri-
cultural crisis. The dynamics of this certain failure can play out in a number
of ways. Government agents whose job it is to carry out the reading agenda
may find ways to revise their own “scientific” curriculum, perhaps even to

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the point of incorporating elements of whole language, without of course
acknowledging this publicly. The most hardened phonics advocates may
demand even more phonics in the classroom and try to deal final blows to
art, music, and physical education on the grounds that they are taking pre-
cious time away from “reading.” Already, naptime is being eliminated in some
kindergarten classes so that children have more time for test preparation.
Some may claim that the problem lies with teacher training at the col-
lege level and pressure for new, state-approved certification requirements, that
is, for “standards” in colleges of education, thus clearly violating academic
freedom. Extremists with this point of view may even advocate terrorist tac-
tics, as was actually the case with Bush’s chief phonics advisor, Reid Lyon,
who publicly, and very soberly, announced his desire to “blow up colleges
of education” (November 18, 2002), that is, to start teacher training from
a new ground zero.17 Finally, corporate America itself may step in from be-
hind the scenes and demand the removal of the current science generals,
including Reid Lyon himself, and their replacement by others whose snake
oil sounds more credible.
Every one of these, or other, machinations will further expose the un-
democratic nature of corporate control of the curriculum. They will there-
fore create opportunities for those who believe in teacher professionalism,
children’s rights, and democratic classrooms to make their case before more
and more people.

CRACKS IN THE SYSTEM AND OPPORTUNITIES|
FOR RESISTANCE
There is no more well-armed force on earth than corporate America. It
controls the skies and the broadcast airwaves in them. It controls the seas
and all the water and life it has polluted there. It looks upward and dreams
of controlling space. And now it casts its vision right here at home, eager
to control the classrooms of children of working people.
But ordinary working people are also armed, with a desire for peace and
justice, with democratic ideals, and even with truths about education and
childhood that can instill the desires and ideals with practical power. This
power can be applied to all the opportunities that currently exist and that
will open up in the future to expose corporate America’s plans to destroy
childhood in the name of profits.
These opportunities can be found in numerous places. At the level of sci-
ence, the intensive phonics program can be exposed for the scandalous
pseudoscience it really is. Purportedly based on a “medical” model of re-
search, the National Reading Panel report never once asked the full pano-
ply of questions that are routinely asked when medical interventions are
examined, questions that deal not only with benefits but also with side ef-
fects and toxicities.

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130 Defending Public Schools

There is no question that intensive phonics has adverse consequences,
because it takes time away from real reading, turns many children off to read-
ing as a result of its boring laboriousness, and can directly harm children who
enjoy books by telling them, incorrectly, that they are nonreaders, when this
is based solely on an ill-conceived test score.
Furthermore, no medical model of intervention has the added stipulation
that a patient has no right to refuse treatment or to opt for a treatment that
is considered less likely to succeed. No medical model of intervention forces
a physician to prescribe a certain drug or perform a certain operation against
his or her better judgment. No physician with any self-respect would ever
tell a patient that a drug or surgical intervention is being recommended
because “that’s what the law is forcing me to do.”
At the level of democratic rights, the program of intensive phonics also
fails. With No Child Left Behind, the government has actually established a
state definition of science. Science must be experimental in design, even
though other scientific methodologies are widely employed, including de-
scriptive methodologies for phenomena that are difficult to quantify, such
as cultural rituals, animal behavior, and interpretation of written language.
As a corollary, No Child Left Behind legislates a government definition
of reading. Its provisions for high-stakes testing and accountability are ele-
ments of a coercive pedagogy, designed to force teachers to act according
to government prescription.
In a democracy, the curriculum of public schools should be a matter of
public discussion. While some may feel that vocational training is the cen-
tral mission of curriculum, others may feel that childhood itself should be
the mission, à la John Dewey, and that specialized training should be left
for a later time. Thus, the battle for the classroom is, in a sense, a battle for
the curriculum, with the future worker and the present child representing
its two poles. In an important sense, therefore, opponents of curriculum for
a workforce-development system are, at the same time, opponents of abu-
sive child labor, or to put it more accurately, of abusive child labor training.
Clearly, the struggle around democratic rights carries over into the
struggle around issues of pedagogy itself. And it is at the level of pedagogy
that the corporate agenda is probably most vulnerable, because there is al-
ready movement throughout the country, and increasingly vociferous, against
the implementation of high-stakes testing. Indeed, the Business Roundtable
has posted a document on its website on how business leaders can monitor
and counteract the growing “testing backlash.” It notes, quite interestingly,
that the opponents of testing are more likely to include mothers than fathers.
Without searching for explanation, it regards the men as allies and the women
as potential troublemakers. Clearly, this finding, if accurate, reflects the his-
torically determined cultural and emotional distancing of fathers from their
children, as compared with mothers. One has to wonder if the Business
Roundtable is proud of this finding.

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Teachers object to high-stakes testing on many grounds. Arbitrary num-
bers decide funding and promotion. The serious consequences of the test
scores compel teachers to “teach to the test,” thus eliminating creativity from
the profession and ultimately turning it into mere test preparation. And the
notion of standards itself is clearly one-sided, with the one-dimensional
emphasis on vocational training creating refugees out of other far more stan-
dard elements of the human experience, such as music, art, and physical
education.
In struggling to maintain its professionalism in the classroom, and to re-
sist corporate America’s extreme takeover of curriculum, teachers will dis-
cover a variety of allies. These will include those parents and students who
have already organized local anti-high-stakes testing groups, themselves
motivated by a desire to preserve quality curriculum and avoid turning as-
sessment into punishment. Teachers will find allies in the children’s rights
movement and among women, traditional opponents of any form of child
exploitation. It will find allies among African Americans and other minori-
ties, whose children traditionally do not do as well as white children on cul-
turally biased standardized tests. It will find allies among antiwar activists who
object to an education bill that gives the Pentagon freer access to children’s
names and addresses. And since the bureaucracy of the American Federation
of Teachers has gone on a public campaign in support of the corporate-gov-
ernment scheme, teachers will find allies among coworkers who have long
sought democratic changes in the union, and a leadership accountable to its
members and to parents and students rather than to the needs of corporate
America.
Though it may be a difficult one, it can truly be said that the struggle to
defend children is, at the same time, a struggle to defend all victims of a
system that puts corporate profits above all else.

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Ch9_119-132.pmd 132 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

— 10 —

The Body and Sexuality
in Curriculum
LISA W. LOUTZENHEISER

Sexuality—both authorized and unauthorized—is an ever-present, even if in-
visible discourse of the school.
—Magda Lewis

INTRODUCTION
We are culturally suspended in an age where, for better or worse, sex, sexu-
ality, and body image are the currency of adolescent culture. Looks, body
size, and sexual orientation are key elements in the make-it-or-break-it world
of peer acceptance and popularity. As constructed as these social markers may
be, they are the cultural capital of adolescent society. What is relevant to this
chapter, then, are the ways in which youth navigate their various identities
and how schools make visible the terrain of normative behavior and the
unattainable standards set by the dominant culture. Also significant is the
further propagation of these norms within the physical space of our class-
rooms and hallways, and the silent spaces of our curricula.

SOCIAL PRESSURES? POLITICAL PRESSURES?
FAMILIAL PRESSURES? ACADEMIC PRESSURES?
WHERE DO WE BEGIN?
Youth face a number of challenges both inside and outside of school.
While it would be less difficult to discuss these issues as separate, self-

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134 Defending Public Schools

contained challenges to adolescent life, in actuality, there are no isolated is-
sues. There are, however, issues that intersect in multiple ways, spaces, and
places where the mechanisms and measures of social acceptability and failure
come together to form the frameworks, and seemingly unavoidable binaries,
of cultural inclusion/exclusion, popularity/social stigma, and success/failure.
Individual pressures range from grade point averages and SAT scores to team
memberships, acceptance, belonging, sexual conquest, and fashion savvy, all
of which contribute to the development of the individual’s idea of “self.”
For the “out” queer kid, the “closeted” gay or lesbian youth, and the “ques-
tioning” teen, these already overwhelmingly complex challenges are com-
pounded by the added layer of normativity enacted by the categorizations
of gender and sexuality.
The ideology of gender—what a girl should look like, how a boy’s mas-
culinity is defined (and all the subsequent limitations that constitute similar
gender binaries)—form the categorical parameters of social acceptance. For
adolescents who do not fit neatly into the limited categorizations of the social
world, these barriers are omnipresent and seemingly impenetrable. Com-
monly, gender is narrowly understood as the way in which sexism is perpetu-
ated on women by men, and while this occurs and needs to be deconstructed
as such, to leave the dialogue there does not address the larger issues that
gender encompasses. What I am arguing for is an uncovering of the assump-
tions that are held about gender and the roles that gender play vis-à-vis dis-
cussions of sexism, heteronormativity, and constructions of femininities and
masculinities.
Because of the salience that sexuality and the body hold for youth, and
the particular backlash-oriented historical instant in which we are positioned,
this moment is ripe for discussions in the classroom, at the school board, at
dinner tables, in churches, and in grocery stores. The idea that adolescents
are “too sexual” and/or that youth culture is violent and hypersexualized is
an accusation hurled with increasing import. It is not that youth are too
sexual, but that the ways in which the accepted modulations of sexuality are
limited to gender stereotypes and heterosexual performance are problematic
and exclusionary of youth whose identities are messy and defiantly Other.
Most children and young people spend a large percentage of their waking
hours within school walls. In part, this is the reason why there is such a com-
mon belief that schools and teachers can raise our children. Even though this
is an unfair and unreasonable expectation, it does highlight the possibilities,
even constrained by the current climate of standardized testing. Increasingly,
schools are developing curricula, pedagogies, and policies centering on school
culture to make schools more welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-
gender, and queer (LGBTQ) students, and to educate their peers and
teachers about issues of concern to sexual minority youth and adults.
However, the function and structure of the school can make change dif-
ficult. Magda Lewis and Barbara Karin speak of the ways that “schools have

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The Body and Sexuality in Curriculum 135

succeeded [in] containing the body as a site of knowledge and self-authority
by managing, contriving and regulation of bodies as sites of specific and
allowable discourses writ large in the particular enactments of femininity
and masculinity.”1 Self-esteem, self-worth, and self-knowledge are central
to academic success; students who do not see themselves in curricula care
far less about learning, and those who see themselves in a dominant way
within the curriculum learn to judge those whose identities seem to fall
outside of the curricular borders. The school space is not separate from the
rest of the world—it is part of that world, and as such, we need to address
what “it” is that shapes our educational policy, curriculum, and classrooms.
Curricula, and students’ reactions to what is included in or omitted from
them, point quite clearly to the fallacy of a split between the public and
the private sphere.
I have constructed two vignettes to draw out several of the issues that face
sexual minority youth. Although Marion and George are fictional characters,
they are constructed from the stories told to me as teacher, researcher, or
professor. Each of the discussed events occurred to an individual, but I have
brought the details together in slightly altered representations in order to
make Marion and George unrecognizable. The stories attempt to synthesize
a few of the experiences that sexual minority youth encounter. The vignettes
offer a small, and very partial, view of sexual minority youth. Following each
story is an analysis of the issues and a discussion of why public schools and
public school curricula are well suited to work with them. Additionally, I ask
what schools and communities might do to address the need for sexuality
education. Even though the focus remains on those students who are often
marginalized and poorly served by the current educational system, the ways
in which LGBTQ bodies fight within current structures are important for
majority-sexual youth (and adults) to explore.

CHANGING SPACES AND ALTERED VIEWING
“I’m 16, but sometimes I feel 30, and other days around 12. I mean, in
some ways, I have had to grow up really fast but in others I’m socially
stunted. I don’t really know how to talk to guys like I want to, like my friends
would talk to girls.” George is a student at East Side Secondary, a high school
in an urban center on the West Coast of the United States. He and his fam-
ily have just moved to the city, after having lived in a rural area for fifteen
years. In his small town, he knew everyone and everyone knew him. George
was “the artistic one,” and the one who was good with his hands. Every-
one could see that he was not interested in sports, but if they wanted their
bicycle or car worked on, or an actor for the school play, they came to him.
He was different, and while occasionally reminded of it, he was mostly tol-
erated as the designated oddball who did not do as people expected (date
lots of girls, play basketball, etc.) Because he was of relatively small build,

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136 Defending Public Schools

George could avoid the pull toward team sports, although every year the
wrestling coach tried to encourage him to join the team.
George realized he liked boys more than girls early on, but kept that
knowledge to himself. He did not know any gay people in his town and, until
recently, did not have a computer and didn’t feel comfortable accessing
LGBT materials at the public or school library. No one ever really talked
about such issues in school or out, unless it was hearing the words “fag” or
“that’s so gay,” in the hallways. That wasn’t the same as having someone or
someplace where he could talk about it. Occasionally, George would hear
students at school say “fag” under their breath as he walked by, or girls, who
for some reason thought he was cute, half-mockingly question why he did
not ask them out. His best friend Miranda offered him cover of sorts; they
had been attending social functions together forever. He was not really try-
ing to fool anyone, but just felt as if in this town it was easier to not make a
point of who he thought he was.
Last May, his mom had found this great new job and they (his mom, his
little sister, and George) had moved to a city on the other side of the country.
In some ways, he was really excited to move; George had just discovered that
he could talk to other gay teens through the Internet. He had a secondhand
computer and was finally hooked up. It seemed like a lot of people who re-
sponded in the chat rooms lived in larger cities. He was surprised and re-
lieved to know that there were other kids like him who had similar interests.
George thought that in a city, he might have more freedom to be himself.
If he was very lucky, there might be other gay teens at his school. But the
reality was a huge disappointment.
For the first time in his life, he was targeted at school. Everyday, he was
taunted with shouts of “fag,” people pushed him or, perhaps even worse,
ignored him altogether. No one knew that he worked on cars and loved
drama, and it seemed as if no one was very interested in finding out. All they
could see was his difference, the ways in which he was not like them. He
became “George the fag” and that was all that formed his public identity.
He was shocked that teachers saw him being taunted, pushed, or laughed
at and did nothing. Similarly, when openly antigay comments were made,
most of the teachers overlooked them or glanced at him apologetically and
shrugged. School became a series of incidents centered on navigating the
halls, breaks, and lunchrooms, rather than about learning. College, perhaps
even graduate school, had been his goal, either in drama or psychology, but
his grades dropped pretty drastically. It seemed as if it was hard to pay at-
tention in class, or perhaps his grades fell because, on many days, he just left
school at lunch to avoid the inevitable noontime display of homophobia.
Yet, despite the isolation and taunting from his peers, things were open-
ing up for him. He had found a gay and lesbian center where there was a
youth group. It was one-and-a-half hours away by bus, and it seemed to take
him forever to get there, but once there it was a veritable haven. There were

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The Body and Sexuality in Curriculum 137

kids and adults, including a volunteer who was a teacher, and it was more
than a group of people sitting around socializing. They were involved with
doing things in the community or going to demonstrations. But, unfortu-
nately, because of the distance and bus fare, he could only get there two or
three times a month. The rest of the time, he was pretty much on his own.

Not an Easy Road
Schools are difficult places for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and
queer youth. In a recent survey of youth who identify as sexual minorities,
The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) found that 84
percent of LGBTQ students reported being verbally harassed because of their
sexual orientation, including 92 percent who heard remarks such as “fag-
got,” “dyke,” and “that’s so gay” used frequently or often.2 Students of
color, who felt increased harassment as almost half (45 percent), stated that
they were verbally taunted because of their sexual orientation and race/
ethnicity.
Just as George felt that teachers let homophobic slurs and teasing pass
without comment, youth in the research conducted by GLSEN note that
teachers and staff are not very adept at responding to these remarks, as 37
percent of students said that the faculty “never” intervene when hearing these
comments, and 46 percent felt that faculty responded only some of the time.
Only 14 percent reported that faculty responded most of the time. The lack
of teacher and staff response is problematic on many levels. Of greatest con-
cern, however, is the modeling that teachers, parents, and community mem-
bers provide students. Thus, the behavior of individual teachers, be it action
or inaction, may impact the response and behavior of any or all of the chil-
dren or youth who witness it.
George experienced an escalation of this harassment, from verbal to
physical, as did 40 percent of the youth in the GLSEN study, who note that
they have been shoved, pushed, or otherwise physically abused due to their
sexual orientation. Transgender students are most at risk, with a more than
30 percent greater risk for unwanted physical contact than lesbian, gay, or
bisexual students. Similarly, LGBTQ students are more likely to have prop-
erty stolen or damaged at school than their nonsexual minority peers (58
percent versus 35 percent). Almost two-thirds of all LGBTQ students re-
port feeling unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation, and more
than a quarter of them state that they missed at least one day of school be-
cause they felt unsafe. This percentage increases to 35 percent for LGBTQ
youth of color.
George left school at lunchtime to avoid such harassment and, similar to
many other LGBTQ youth, this affected his grades. GLSEN found that stu-
dent grade point averages dropped from an average of 3.3/4.0 for LGBTQ
students who did not report frequent verbal harassment to 2.9/4.0 for those

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138 Defending Public Schools

who did. Dropout rates for GLBT students are above the national average,
and those, like George, who experience frequent verbal harassment are more
than twice as likely not to attend college than those who report rare or less
frequent harassment.3 Combine what occurs in schools with the pressures
and systemic discriminations that LGBTQ students face in other areas of their
lives, as well as in the media, and the outcomes become sadly predictable.
Students often feel isolated and Othered, which, in turn, can lead to drop-
ping out, self-mediating substance abuse, and, in some cases, even to sui-
cide. Studies have suggested that 30 percent of all youth suicides are
committed by lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth; that they are three to five
times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers; and that
they succeed in killing themselves more often.4 This is not to argue that the
majority of LGBTQ youth attempt suicide, fail at school, or dropout. There
are many, of course, who do not; however, any percentage that falls out of
the educational system because of sexual orientation, or because of the ways
sexual orientations intersect with issues of race, is too high.
It is important to note that circumstances are equally difficult for those
perceived to be LGBTQ, because harassment and teasing occur based on the
perpetrators’ perceptions of their target’s sexuality. If they read the other
student’s body as “other than” or nonconforming in terms of gender norms,
then often they interpret them as LGBTQ and direct their homophobia based
on that assumption. Most often students are not beat up because they are
known as gay but because they “look” or “act” gay. This is testimony to the
pressure to conform, and, in the end, the limits of sexual conformity.

MISREPRESENTING GENDER AND SEX
The words gender and sex are often used and conflated but are rarely
carefully defined or, when they are defined, are rarely positioned outside the
binaries of boy/girl, male/female. Binaries consist of two separate elements
considered in diametric opposition. Oftentimes, sex is considered to be the
biological distinction between male and female, while gender is explained
as a social construction. That is, gender is a performance of social norms
understood to be either masculine or feminine in terms of their enactments
rather than the presentation of some “true” manifestation of what is male
or female. Some have argued that sex is that which we are born with, and
gender is that which we gain or acquire. Accordingly, masculinity and femi-
ninity take on meaning through the social, political, and historical contexts
in which they are located. However, the terms gender and sex remain am-
biguous and contested; they are not easily distinguishable and, as some theo-
rists argue, ought not be the subject of dichotomous or binary definitions.5
Judith Butler, for example, argues that it is impossible to separate gender
from sex, sex from gender, and gender or sex from sexuality. Equally unwork-
able are attempts to fundamentally erase binary definitions that presume a

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The Body and Sexuality in Curriculum 139

primal or originary biological sex.6 Therefore, we ought to be questioning
the certainty that sex and gender categories are useful and argue, instead,
that the categories and meaning makings of boy, girl, male, female, man, and
woman are discursively constituted through both language and social inter-
action. That is, we are reliant upon understandings of language and its im-
plications as unchanging in order to make meaning and sense of words,
symbols, and the performance of words such as gender and sex. For example,
if the word man is uttered, an image appears in the reader’s mind. It might
be different for different readers, but the language conjures up a represen-
tation, which, in turn, places more meaning on the word and the gendered
performance of the term, and the interpretation of that performance.

Performance of Gender, Masculinity, and Sexuality
Gender is everywhere at school, whether it is discussed or silent, and there-
fore gender norms are also constantly in play. In addition, the pressures
brought to bear on boys and men who do not meet the societal definitions
or gender norms of an “authentic” masculinity are often under-explored.
Connell argues that masculinity is not stationary nor merely a linguistic or
material given; rather, it is created, reinforced, and re-created as individuals
and groups act and are acted upon. Male bodies, and those persons con-
structed vis-à-vis the male body, are acted upon by media and school struc-
tures that valorize a particular kind of maleness over those it considers lesser
or weak.7
Indeed, as Epstein argues, dominant bodies are unavoidably heterosexual
or assumed to be heterosexual because masculinity and femininity are inter-
twined and, thus, a “real” boy or girl is, and must be, assumed to be hetero-
sexual.8 In order to be considered authentically masculine, one must conform
to certain gender ideals. Boys at the bottom of the student heap are consid-
ered less masculine, constructed more like a girl than a boy and, therefore,
not “fully” a man. One need only to walk the halls of any school to under-
stand that the insults of choice between boys and young men are “fag” and
“sissy.” When a male does not conform to traditional gender role perfor-
mances, he is assumed gay and this performance of gay (no matter the young
person’s sexual orientation) serves as a policing of the gender norms around
him and to which he is expected to conform. The student is constructed as
an Other , who is always held up as that which is not masculine. In these
ways, gender and sex act as a regulatory agent for normative sexuality.
In the small, rural town where George spent most of his early years, he
was accepted after a fashion. He was not overtly harassed. However, the price
for that “tolerance” was that he did not stray too far from the heterosexual
norm. The idea that there is a pervasive and systemic assumption of hetero-
sexuality as norm has been called “heteronormativity.” Michael Warner
describes how “heterosexual culture thinks of itself as the elemental form of

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140 Defending Public Schools

human association, as the very model of inter-gender relations, as the indi-
visible basis of all community, and the means of reproduction without which
society wouldn’t exist.”9 The ramifications of heteronormativity are the si-
lences LGBTQ students are forced to endure, the constant pressures to take
on, as George did, the trappings of heterosexuality such as opposite-sex dat-
ing or joining the wrestling team.10 If George, as someone who does not
physically conform to stereotypical gender norms, fails to adopt some part
of heteronormative attitudes—such as, he does not fix cars and bikes as well
as act—he is more likely to be targeted as Other, or deviant. This is difficult
for a youth to work through and with on an individual level, but on a sys-
temic level it tells students and teachers alike that they do not belong and,
through curricular and pedagogical silences, never have.
What might it mean to build pedagogies and curricula that interrogate
the complicated nature of masculinities in classrooms? How do we create
curricula that both invite an understanding of the powerful political, social,
and historical positions of some men and explore how masculinities regu-
late all genders and sexualities?
George measures up against these norms enough to “pass.” And when
he lived in the small town, he chose to pass because it gave him freedom
from harassment and exclusion. Yet, there is a toll for this perceived assimi-
lation. He felt as if he were living a lie and not standing up for himself. His
fellow students lost the opportunity to see and hear a side of him that might
encourage less Othering.

DEFENDING CHANGE IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
There have been lengthy debates about the purposes of school and school-
ing. There are numerous beliefs ranging from the pursuit of knowledge for
knowledge’s sake, assimilation into a common culture or set of values, edu-
cating “good citizens,” or training “the next generation of workers.” No
matter what the purposes may be, it is unquestionable that public schools
in Canada and the United States have the largest block of early exposure to
children and youth of any social institution. How we identify the roles of
schools will likely define how we view teaching children to live within in-
creasingly diverse societies. The school can be a powerful agent for social
change, but more often it is an equal, if not more powerful, supporter of
the status quo. Yet, the possibility of change in schools leaves many of us
hopeful about the changes that might be wrought if teachers were allowed
to teach without the relentless pressure of standards, standardized tests, and
“teaching to” said tests. As of yet, no standardized test has attempted to
measure knowledge and reflection regarding issues of race, sexuality, gen-
der, or class. We have to question what the role of the school can be in social
change.

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The Body and Sexuality in Curriculum 141

WHAT SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES CAN DO
There are a number of ways to combat heterosexism and homophobia in
the classroom and school, yet there I can not offer one or two foolproof
suggestions that are appropriate for each school because local context is vi-
tal in planning a strategy. However, changes can be accomplished at both
the school board and classroom levels. One way that schools can respond
to physical harassment is to develop a district or school board-wide policy
that bans physical and verbal harassment. In one study of queer youth and
literacy, a student talked about being unafraid at school because her peers
knew that they would be expelled for fighting or hurting someone.11 This
was enough to protect the student from serious threats at school. The stu-
dent also pointed out that this does nothing to change the homophobic
response of other students. It is merely fear that keeps them in check, but
at least she believed that the administration would not tolerate such behav-
ior. Obviously, this is a stopgap measure that allows students some measure
of safety but makes no progress toward systemic change in the school and
classroom environments.
Teachers often ask what they should do to make their classrooms more
welcoming for LGBTQ students. Generally, they do not desire to be unfair
or exclusionary but have received little or no training and are fearful of pa-
rental response. They are told that they decide how much and what will feel
comfortable tackling in their setting. However, there are some simple steps
that can be taken by teachers, parents, and administrators. This includes the
encouragement, time, and structure for teachers and staff to explore how
they, as individuals, the school, their classrooms and pedagogies, and their
community organizations encourage and support heterosexism. It follows
that if an educator has explored heterosexism, she or he will be better pre-
pared to broach this topic with students in a manner that is not defensive
or will not cause surprise at the content. When ready, nearly every teacher
can include homophobic slurs in the prohibitions on language in her or his
classroom rules. Just the conversation that occurs around the rules and how
homophobia and heterosexism might be defined, broaches a topic that many
students have never discussed in a classroom setting. Also, it is up to par-
ents and senior administrators to help support teachers as they attempt to
educate their classes on the dilemmas of heterosexism. Another relatively easy
method of altering school culture is to purchase curriculum materials for the
school library that discuss LGBTQ issues. It is easy because it does not take
a revamping of courses; however, it is also immensely difficult because school
librarians can be rightfully concerned about community reaction. The school
board and principal must proactively demonstrate their support for such
materials.
The phrase “it takes a village to raise a child” has become worn and clichéd
through overuse; yet, responsibility for the complicated and overlapping

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142 Defending Public Schools

concerns of making schools and other social institutions useful, productive
spaces for LGBTQ students and teachers falls to a broad spectrum of indi-
viduals and systems. In order for these institutions and nonsexual minority
individuals to learn about, and ally themselves with, the political and social
concerns facing LGBTQ peoples, other heterosexually identified people must
become proactive. This work falls not only to teachers and administrators
but requires the active support of parents, grandparents, church leaders, and
community members, whether they have children in the school system or
not. This is not to argue that children and youth do not have agency or the
ability to make changes on their own. On the contrary, but in a society that
does not listen well to children, change must be attempted at numerous
levels.
When was the last time you went to a school board meeting, worked with
kids in the schools, or wrote a supportive letter to a school board or local
newspaper? How many people are involved with the PTAs of their areas or
form reading groups or diversity groups within or around the school com-
munity? How many heterosexually identified community and school mem-
bers refuse to wait for those who identify as sexual minorities to take the lead
and initiate discussions and/or pronounce their support of LGBTQ content,
curricula, and pedagogies? How many people of any sexual orientation men-
tor a LGBTQ youth, encourage students to organize and advocate for what
they need, or refuse to let those around them use “simple” phrases such as
“that’s so gay” without a response? If the only people or groups to show
up at school board meetings about allowing sex education, condoms in the
schools, books with LGBT content, or Gay Straight Alliances are well orga-
nized groups who oppose such thinking on religious or ideological grounds,
they seem to speak, then, as if with a united voice, when in fact they are the
minority, and there is a huge silent majority. If individuals who are part of
sexual minority communities attend and speak at these meetings, they are
seen as “having an agenda” or “speaking without objectivity.” Therefore,
those who are heterosexual are in a much safer place and, unfortunately, in
more often heard positions and, thus, can become catalysts for change where
often GLBTQ individuals cannot. In order for things to begin to change
beyond mere “window-dressing,” individuals and groups who support sexual
minority youth and teachers must make their thoughts and feelings known.

MOVING FOWARD, QUEERLY
Marion is 17 years old, biracial, and born and raised in the same large city,
a city thought to be reasonably progressive. She identifies as queer. Her mom
and dad have been supportive of her explorations and declarations regard-
ing her sexuality, which started at 13 years old. They have encouraged her
to speak up for herself, surround herself with good friends, and join which-
ever political and social groups she had an interest in. She has a fairly large

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The Body and Sexuality in Curriculum 143

group of friends but only a few people in whom she confides. Her friends
see her as the one to go to with a problem. Marion is an attentive listener,
and she is appreciated for that. Her friends describe her as “fun,” “loud,”
“talkative,” and always “a really good friend you can count on.”
When her attraction to both boys and girls became more apparent, she
did not struggle with the idea of not being heterosexual. For Marion, the
knowledge and ambiguity made everything just a bit more clear. Her par-
ents nodded kindly, although Marion thought that she saw a bit of wistful-
ness in her mother’s eye, imagining a bubble forming above her head, reading
“what might have been.” Similarly, none of her friends pushed her away; she
knew she was lucky. Nevertheless, she still sometimes worries about what the
straight kids think or whether students or teachers treat her in a particular
way because she is “out” on campus. She wonders if she loses out on any-
thing and that thought makes her feel very angry.
Marion does reasonably well at school, though everyone says she could
do better. She is not very involved with school groups, although she was on
the Student Council in grade nine. Marion has always been confused that
adults, and maybe some students, see her as a leader when she has done
nothing to validate this. No one gives her a particularly hard time at school,
but no one except her queer friends ever seems to want to talk about the
possibility of LGBTQ people existing at her school, or even out in the world.
The exception to this is one of the English teachers who declares the sexu-
ality of each and every author he uses in class. It is almost as if he was told
at some point that this was one way to talk about “it”; it, of course, being
the incorporation of gay and lesbian content. But his intensely serious pro-
nouncements have become a joke, with students looking at each other and
laughing each time he does it. It seems as if teachers feel so uncomfortable
with the idea of queer students that the possibility that they exist in their
school is foreign. Perhaps if it is discovered, it ought to be kept quiet. The
very use of the word gay, much less queer, makes adults squirm and change
the subject, which Marion admits can be fun but not very helpful in the long
run.
For a long time, Marion did not label herself as anything, in terms of her
sexuality. Not that she didn’t know that she liked boys and girls, but lesbian
seemed old-fashioned, and bisexual was something that caused people to look
at her derisively and argue that she was stuck on some invisible fence. None
of the labels really fit, maybe because they were labels. Then, she started
reading and hearing other people talk about “queer,” which was kind of
messy and didn’t ask you to choose who you were each and every day. Queer
seemed to state up front that it was political, a rejection of the old standard,
in both the heterosexual world and that of older gays and lesbians. She liked
it and was really surprised at her mother’s vehemently negative response.
“That’s an awful word,” she said. “Why would you want to call yourself
something that people have used forever to harass gay people?” Aren’t you

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144 Defending Public Schools

and your friends just being confrontational to be confrontational? How are
people (meaning non-queer, non-gay) going to know when it is okay to call
you a queer?”

WHY QUEER?
Queer as a term, as opposed to gay, lesbian, or bisexual, purposefully dis-
rupts the notion that identity is fixed or immutable. It includes the desire
to highlight the existence of, and to interrupt silent assumptions about, het-
erosexuality as normal and homosexuality as Other. In the classroom and in
schools, this form of “ultimate” naming around which individuals are orga-
nized into groups results in students too often being viewed as universal-
ized,. For example, queer students whose queerness simultaneously disallows
recognition as female, working class, differently-abled, and/or of color.
Understanding gender as singular silences the ways in which it functions for
both women and men, and that race, sex, and sexuality, for example, have a
regulatory function upon each other. The utilization of queer allows for an
understanding of the individual more clearly met at the intersections of these
myriad identities.
Each day in a typical classroom, there is regulation of student and teacher
sex, gender, and sexuality. Butler argues that utilizing sex and sexuality not
only operates and sets out the boundaries as a norm but also functions as
part of a system or practice that both regulates what is normal and repro-
duces what is acceptable in relation to gender, sex, and sexuality through its
very regulatory nature. What is male or female, in the ways constructed on
biological terms, becomes an ideal that can never be made real but is articu-
lated and circulated and re-articulated through bodies that attempt to, and
are forced to, adhere to an impossible set of gender norms.12
Although the term queer has often been used as a pejorative—individu-
ally, theoretically, and politically—it has been reclaimed as a pedagogy, poli-
tics, and theory that dislodge the requirements of fixed identities, such as
gay or lesbian and, subsequently, heterosexual. This invites an opening up
of spaces where commonsense understandings of sex and sexuality are left
messy and productively problematic. For educators, this affords the possi-
bility of discussing sexuality as a site of social change in ways that demand
that attention be paid to the intersectionality of races, genders, and sexuali-
ties.

A Fixed Curricular Identity—Add For Color and Texture
While many schools have instituted some form of multicultural or anti-
racism education program, the majority fail to incorporate the sexuality re-
lated concerns of queer youth within the official curriculum. These missing
discourses tell queer youth that they are not worthy of inclusion, that their

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The Body and Sexuality in Curriculum 145

lives are uncomplicated, and that they are and ought to remain invisible.13
Contemporarily, curricular change focusing on sexuality has most often been
focused on “add and stir” models. These models insert a lesson here or there
on top of the “regular” lessons. This creates a curriculum that supplements
the traditional guide to “include” women, people of color, and/or queer
peoples without contextualizing or building interconnectedness with the rest
of the content. Such lessons are generally developed with a desire for inclu-
sion. However, little of the curricular or pedagogical planning is changed;
the unit or essential questions are unaltered and the critical analyses of the
roles of gender, race, and/or sexuality are left unexplored. It allows, though,
the schools, teachers, and school boards to tick off the gender/or multi-
cultural education box of curricular reform without altering the school cul-
ture or its explicit and hidden curricula.

What Is Queering and Queer Theory?
One method of reading texts, policies, and historical events in such a way
as to problematize the “normal” utilizes similar reasoning as the use of
‘queer. Queer theory invites an opening up of spaces where commonsense
understandings of sex and sexuality, the political, social, and historical rela-
tionships, and the contexts in which they function are left open, untidy, and
difficult. That is, we can develop within education a theory that requires ways
of teaching and learning, and that views identities as fluid and changing.
The queering of pedagogy and curricula is not a call to speak of sex, or
sex acts, in the classroom. Nor is queer theory a call for the classroom to
become gendered and (hetero)sexualized. It is, rather, a tool to uncover and
analyze how the classroom is already sexualized and heterosexualized.14
Daunting though it may be, it also encourages interrogations of all catego-
ries to which we seem drawn to organize. It is the work of these theories to
disrupt the uncritical usage of categories and labeling, and require interro-
gations of when these constructions are useful and when they further ste-
reotype, or merely encourage, a lack of complexity in favor of ease of
understanding. That is, questioning the easiness of placing individuals, events,
and solutions into established categories that make solutions and understand-
ings more straightforward.

THE ROLES OF SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES IN
SCHOOL-BASED CHANGE
Schools are fertile locations for both social change and the stagnation of
stereotypes. Knowledge production and the lapses and inclusions of gender
and sexuality in teaching and learning demand thoroughgoing and compli-
cated analyses, as do the inclusion and exclusion of gender and sexuality in
curricula. Without such analyses, there is a risk of a continuation and

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146 Defending Public Schools

promotion of gender-based stereotypes. As noted above, the opportunities
to develop nuanced understandings of the intersections and interdepen-
dencies of gender, sex, and sexuality are lost when each is considered in iso-
lation. These conversations have particular salience in the classroom because
ideals of democratic participation, citizenship, civil rights, historical accuracy,
and social issues are laced throughout.
One method is to ask students to explore what is normative or hetero-
normative, in popular culture, including movies, television, magazines,
websites, and so on. This can be an invitation to analyze and critique the
body, gender, and sexuality in pop culture, textbooks, and primary docu-
ments. While this obviously offers an entertaining entry point, it also has a
far more serious purpose. It asks students to view critically the body and how
it is manipulated. The realization of this manipulation offers a particularly
poignant moment for viewing popular media. While one could analyze popu-
lar culture without a fluid notion of identity, this notion of identity would
mean analyzing media of all types through a fluidity of identities.

COMPLICATING CONVERSATIONS
How might the vignettes and analyses presented above become more
complicated? What has been left silent and unmarked? In the story of George,
what do we know about him, and what do we assume? George’s racial and
ethnic background is completely ignored. When you viewed him in your
mind’s eye, did you see him as white? What would it mean to your under-
standings of the issues involved if I told you that at home he is called “Jorge”
and that his parents came from Costa Rica? What if it were Mexico rather
than Costa Rica? Would that change the story? Too often, when one iden-
tity is marked, such as sexuality, other identity markers are assumed to fall
away under the weight of that which is most salient, even when the topic of
the work is intersecting and fluid. However, if George were asked, he would
likely say that he could not separate out the individual identity categories
and discard them. Too often, we undercomplicate identity because it is easier
and more manageable to work with one issue at a time. George tells us that
it is impossible because neither he nor any other person is able to shave off
one piece of him- or herself and understand it as monolithic, or the same as
all others of that group, no matter their other identity intersections. The
desire to move away from stable and unchanging identities is a piece of the
growing field of queer politics and queer theory. While this complicating
opens up possibilities, its very incarnation also causes concerns about the loss
of political coalescing and training for differences in schools.
The challenges of these issues on the whole and of addressing them within
the scope of a book chapter is not only to reveal the regulatory nature of
gender, sex, sexualities, and heteronormativity occurring in schools and class-
rooms but also to trouble the ways in which these gendered mechanisms

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The Body and Sexuality in Curriculum 147

intersect with, and reinforce, other identity constructions in the classroom.
Turning a critical eye toward the normative and normalizing and exploring
their place in the classroom through a lens of queer, queer theories, fluid-
ity, and nonessentialized identity categories may offer all of those who think
and theorize about teaching and learning a productive path toward work-
ing with, among, and across differences.

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— 11 —

When Race Shows up in the
Curriculum: Teacher (Self)
Reflective Responsibility in
Students’ Opportunities to Learn
H. RICHARD MILNER, LEON D. CALDWELL,
AND IRA E. MURRAY

Public schools in the United States have faced harsh criticism over the last
two decades.1 Among the list of criticisms of schools and, consequently,
teachers, administrators, and districts is that of poor student performance on
academic measures, particularly among students of color. No doubt, students
of color are not performing or achieving as well as their white counterparts.
In particular, African American and Hispanic American students typically do
not achieve at the same or similar levels as white students in most academic
areas.2 Steele reminds us that virtually every academic achievement measure
shows, for instance, African American students trailing white students in the
content areas.3
There are those who make the argument that the causes of such academic
disparities are related more to socioeconomics than race or other factors.
However, Ladson-Billings and Tate maintain that:

Although both class and gender can and do intersect race, as stand-alone vari-
ables they do not explain all of the educational achievement differences appar-
ent between Whites and students of color. Indeed, there is some evidence to
suggest that even when we hold constant for class, middle-class African-Ameri-
can students do not achieve at the same level as their White counterparts.4

These differences are consistent at every level of schooling (prekindergarten
through grade twelve), and the predictors, as we have studied them, are not

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150 Defending Public Schools

merely the results of socioeconomic status. Where issues of disparity are
concerned, Ford wrote that:

Black students, particularly males, are three times as likely as White males to
be in a class for the educable mentally retarded, but only half as likely to be
placed in a class for the gifted. Not only are Black students underenrolled in
gifted education programs . . . [but] Black students are over-represented in
special education, in the lowest ability groups and tracks, and among high school
and college dropouts . . . .5

Clearly, at a time when our nation’s schools are under attack, we must think
seriously about some of the academic disparities that still exist in them.
In this chapter, we discuss how race often “shows up” and influences the
curriculum. By curriculum, we mean what students have the opportunity to
learn under the direction of teachers and from the school itself. We discuss
the importance of understanding race in the curriculum—particularly where
teachers are concerned—and the roles of teachers in providing more mean-
ingful learning opportunities for students of color as we attempt to bridge
some of the gaps between students in the United States. We purposefully
frame our discussion in an urgent fashion, as we have come to believe that
without particular attention to some of these matters, we will find the situ-
ation of students of color worsening. Moreover, we present the discussion
in a supportive manner for teachers because we realize the complex nature
of their work. Indeed, teachers have enormous responsibilities and are usu-
ally working to the best of their abilities. Still, there is much work to be done.
We conclude this chapter with methods teachers might employ in their work
to better understand how race shows up in and influences the curriculum
with the goal of providing better learning opportunities for students.

THINKING ABOUT RACE AND CURRICULUM
The specific concern regarding race and the curriculum has been present
in the United States at least since the turn of the twentieth century, when
W.E.B. Dubois, in The Souls of Black Folks, challenged America to consider
an educational agenda that matched the political agenda of emancipation.6
Carter G. Woodson, in the Mis-Education of the Negro, articulated as well
an antiracist agenda.7 In a similar fashion, the question of how to “civilize”
(i.e., assimilate) Native Americans spurned the proliferation of Indian Schools
in the mid-1800s. In more recent times the nation’s historical struggle with
race has continued to underlie arguments from school accountability to equal
access to higher education.8 The concept of race in primary and secondary
education has been the struggle for both a racially inclusive curriculum and
a culturally inclusive pedagogy. In fact, Ladson-Billings and Tate9 asserted
the notion of “critical race theory” in education with one major goal being

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When Race Shows up in the Curriculum 151

to provide theoretical and empirical lenses through which to think about
issues of race. Emerging out of the field of law, critical race theory attempts
to show how race and systemic and institutional barriers surrounding race
still cause racism and injustices. 10 Although some researchers in the field of
education recognize the significance of thinking about race in education,
Ladson-Billings reminds us of the seriousness associated with researching and
theorizing about it.11 Perhaps the serious nature of race helps illuminate why
Ladson-Billings and Tate and Tate stress the point that race is still quite
undertheorized in most disciplines and areas of research and study.12 The
undertheorization of race (particularly in the field of curriculum studies)
necessitates that we think carefully about developing research designs and
conceptual models to attend to race-based issues. The field of curriculum
desperately needs to delve into some of these questions of race, always in-
terrogating and keeping the seriousness of such concerns in mind. Race
clearly has to be studied in a methodical and meticulous manner. Thus, think-
ing about curriculum with race as a central focus must be pursued in a care-
ful, significant, and appropriate manner.

Defining Race in Curriculum
Race in curriculum refers to the implications of a person’s skin color in
relation to the historical, social, and structural issues that frame society and
thus the contemporary, theoretical and applied, curriculum field. We recog-
nize that race is socially constructed. That is, genetically, various racial groups
of people are more the same than they are different. Thinking about race in
curriculum, then, requires us to consider the links between society (on a
macro level) and the school (on a micro level). To further illuminate, be-
cause race matters in the larger society for all individuals, regardless of skin
color, it consequently matters in schools and in the curriculum.13 One mis-
nomer related to the importance of race has to do with who does and who
does not benefit from racial implications—a notion that indicates to whom
race really matters. That is, because of the systemic barriers that often stifle
black American citizens’ experiences, for instance, we often think only about
race mattering to black people or to other groups of people that have been
marginalized or oppressed. However, the benefits that white Americans ob-
tain by virtue of their skin color and how their race has been socially con-
structed as “the right or normal race” privileges them. This points to an
obvious significance, as race matters for all individuals in our country, not
only people of color.
The privilege associated with white people’s experiences enables them to
experience the world (and schooling) at an advantage. Other groups of
people, because they are not white, find themselves at a disadvantage. It is,
therefore, paramount for all students to be introduced to and made cogni-
zant of the experiences of other racial and ethnic groups of people within

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152 Defending Public Schools

the safe confines of the classroom. White and non-white students will all
benefit from sharing their experiences with one another, as it has become
increasingly important for the future survival of a democratic United States.
Citizens of American democracy will not be able to participate at a fully in-
telligent and engaged level if they are not “accurately informed concerning
the problems and contributions of all members of . . . society. This correct
information will make for tolerance and sympathetic understanding among
the members.”14

Race in Curriculum
Because race matters so significantly to all people in our country—whether
white or not—it also matters in our schools. And, arguably, the curriculum
is one of the most important aspects of schooling and society for everyone.
If we think about the curriculum not only as what students have the oppor-
tunity to learn under the direction of teachers and schools but also in con-
junction with who is interpreting the curriculum and who is implementing
it, then race and the curriculum becomes an even more complex and
overarching phenomenon. To be clear, we are suggesting that the teacher,
his or her racial identity, and the nature of that teacher’s interpretations and
enactments of the curriculum are central to what students have the oppor-
tunity to learn. Elsewhere, for example, Milner has written about the influ-
ences of teachers as racial and cultural beings and stressed the necessity of
the awarenesses of their own cultural-comprehensive knowledge-bases.15 In
essence, Milner has reminded teachers that not only is it important for them
to deeply understand Shulman’s16 categories of knowledge, but that they also
need to be in-tune with the bodies of knowledge related to who they are as
cultural beings. Race, then, matters in the curriculum if we think about the
enormous power and contributions teachers make in curricular decision
making,17 as, for instance, researchers consistently point to the huge influ-
ence teachers have in the curriculum and schooling more generally.18

TEACHERS AND THE RACIAL CURRICULUM
If teachers play an enormous role in the curriculum itself, then what a
teacher decides to teach, the pedagogical approaches a teacher decides to
employ, how a teacher interprets the curriculum itself, and the emphases
teachers place on certain dimensions of the curriculum are all important to
race and the teachers’ control (at least on some essential levels). Thus, the
nature of examples used in class, how much time a teacher spends on a par-
ticular topic, and who a teacher calls on to respond (particularly regarding
specific and critical topics) are all connected to that teacher’s racial identity.19
To clarify, because the teaching force in the United States is primarily white,
middle class, and female, these subjective traits may connect to students’

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When Race Shows up in the Curriculum 153

learning opportunities in fundamental and meaningful ways.20 For many
teachers have never had meaningful interactions or relationships with people
of color outside of school.21

Teachers and Racial Identity
An often overlooked aspect of the teaching profession is the concept of
racial identity. A significant research literature has been developed around
whites’ negative attitudes and behaviors toward African Americans and other
ethnic and racial minorities. Helms and Helms and Carter proposed the
White Racial Identity Attitude Theory (WRIAT) that includes two phases:
the abandonment of racism and the development of a positive white iden-
tity.22 Helms’s model suggests that white racial identity develops through six
stages: contact, disintegration, reintegration, pseudo-independence, immer-
sion, and autonomy. Each stage involves an introspective conception of self
as a racial being and conceptions of others and oneself relative to other ra-
cial groups.
Rowe, Bennett, and Atkinson developed a White Racial Consciousness
(WRC) model.23 White consciousness is defined as one’s awareness of be-
ing white and what that implies in relation to those who are not white. The
WRC has two statuses: unachieved status or achieved status, which means
the teacher, in this case, has or has not achieved a healthy positive identity.
There are seven attitude categories: avoidant, dependent, dissonant, domi-
native, conflictive, reactive, and integrative. As previously stated, acknowl-
edging the characteristics of racial identity is an important consideration for
understanding race in the curriculum.
Unfortunately, teacher preparation programs, although offering courses
in multicultural or urban education, create scant opportunities for students,
especially white students, to reflect upon their racial history and socializa-
tion. The cumulative effects of this training gap are the perpetuation of white
privilege, colorblindness, cultural bias, and aversive racism, to name but a
few. Expecting that racially self-unaware preservice teachers will become ra-
cially aware practicing teachers is problematic. The scant discourse in teacher
training programs around issues of racial identity and white privilege is es-
sentially negligent.
The same may be true for teachers of color and their interactions with
white people. For example, Cross provides a review of Black Racial Identity
Theory, which argues that even when teachers (regardless of race) have had
meaningful experiences with people outside of their own race, these experi-
ences may reify stereotypes rather than shed light on more appropriate and
accurate accounts of a group of people.24 It is important to note that we are
not suggesting here that if teachers live in a community with—and on some
level understand—a group of Hispanic American people outside of school,
they will automatically understand all of the Hispanic American students they

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154 Defending Public Schools

encounter. The reality is that students (even within their various racial and
cultural groups) are quite different, and the differences students possess must
be taken into consideration when developing and implementing the curricu-
lum. Thus, of course, it is dangerous to attempt to generalize about any
groups of students based on preconceived assumptions and limited experi-
ences with groups of people.
The emphasis, then, must be placed first on teachers themselves; teach-
ers must understand who they are as racial beings and the influences they
hold in and over the curriculum because of their inherent authority. More-
over, attention and critical consideration must be placed on individual stu-
dents and the multiple life-world experiences that frame their learning and
performances in and outside of school.
Thus, teachers’ knowledges about students of color with whom they come
in contact in schools is often nebulous and tenuous, at best. In essence, there
is a racial and cultural mismatch between teachers and their students. Con-
sequently, the curriculum does not connect to who the students are. Con-
necting to who students are means that teachers must take the whole student
into their minds as they think about learning opportunities. hooks wrote
about this notion of holism and its significance in teaching and learning, and
she links its potency to that of healing. Needless to say, attempting to bridge
the divide between students and the curriculum, particularly where race is
concerned, is very important and, for many, very difficult.25
Where enacting the curriculum is concerned, teachers may select examples
in their teaching that do not line up with the experiences of their students
of color. Our discussion of these racial and cultural mismatches is not meant
to criticize teachers, as many of them have good intentions relative to the
students they teach. However, our discussion is meant to stress the point that
students of color are not white people with pigmented or colored skin.26
Students of color experience the world in ways that are often inconsistent
with their teachers’ backgrounds and those of their white counterparts. And,
because of this, students’ learning styles, their behavior patterns, and their
academic performances and achievement levels are quite different from those
of white students’. Centralizing teachers’ racial identities in the curriculum
points, obviously, to whose knowledge is valued and thus valuable, as well
as validated in society and in school.27 If we believe that students’ knowl-
edge bases matter and are valuable, then the ways in which teachers approach
the curriculum require a form of negotiation that forces teachers to (re)think
who is actually the main arbiter of knowledge and why.28

The Curriculum and Color Blindness
Because students of color experience the world in very different ways from
many of their teachers and white student counterparts, teachers should avoid

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When Race Shows up in the Curriculum 155

Dillard’s notion of “white student” with colored skin.29 There are deep-
rooted issues in society that cause students of color to react to the curricu-
lum in ways that cause teachers frustration and misunderstanding.
Consequently, because of these students’ out of school experiences around
race, teachers should avoid color-blind ideologies in their interpretations of
the curriculum and in their implementations of it. Color-blind ideologies
focus on teachers’ conscious efforts to “not see race” in their teaching.30 We
assert that color blindness is not only impractical but unethical. These ide-
ologies are disadvantageous for students of color because so many of their
life experiences are framed by who they are as racial beings. Moreover, as
Johnson suggests, not seeing color will not allow teachers to see some of
the systemic issues that often become commonplace in schools. These sys-
temic issues that are often perpetuated when we do not consider the signifi-
cance of race include disproportionate representation in special education and
gifted education, as well as high numbers of black students being suspended
and expelled.31
Indeed, some of the behavior “problems” that are attributed to (mostly
male) students of color may in fact be consequences of the efforts of many
teachers, administrators, and other school personnel to implement color-blind
ideologies into their teaching methods. Ralph Ellison eloquently wrote about
this premise in his classic novel Invisible Man. In discussing his “invisibil-
ity” to and in society, which can be appropriately applied to society’s micro-
cosm—that is school—he wrote:

You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds . . . .
It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people
back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with
the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a
part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse
and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.32

Students of color can easily feel like Ellison’s phantom in the collective mind
of their teachers and their curricula and methods. Resentment may set in
from the fact that they are excluded from the dominant academic experience,
and in an effort to incorporate themselves into the classroom experience they
may act out. And, as Ellison writes, it is very seldom successful.
Without a doubt, the absence of recognition in the classroom can have
devastating effects, academically and disciplinary, on students of color. In
addition, this absence has a negative effect on the accuracy of the educational
experience for all students in American schools. The American classroom is
a reflection of what citizens value most dearly. For black students in particular,
inclusion is of the utmost importance because the history and experiences
of African Americans are so imbedded within the fabric of our society’s tra-
ditions and life, so that “to leave out one would be to distort the other.”33

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156 Defending Public Schools

If students of color, their history, or their experiences are not represented
in the classroom, then how can they be expected to feel valued by society?

The Curriculum and Deficit Thinking
Because of how race is socially constructed, teachers often think about
their students of color through “deficit” lenses. Deficit thinking often re-
sults in inaccurate perceptions of marginalized students that may prevent
teachers from developing effective lessons that might better meet the needs
of their diverse learners. Where cultural deficit theories are concerned, Ford
wrote

These theories carry a “blame the victim” orientation, and supporters look upon
Blacks and other minority groups as not only culturally but also intellectually
inferior. According to deficit theories or perspectives, “different” is equated with
deficient, inferior, and substandard.34

Thus, deficit thinking prevents teachers from realizing that all students are
knowledgeable on some levels and bring a wealth of expertise into the learn-
ing context. Such thinking causes teachers to look upon students of color
as liabilities rather than assets.
We are positing that the curriculum, then, may be developed through
deficit orientations based on how teachers think about students of color and
their potential to succeed. The research is clear that high expectations for
and with students of color are more effective than low expectations.35 So,
what students have the opportunity to learn might be framed by teachers’
negative perceptions of students’ performance potential. This point connects
to matters around stereotype threat that Steele writes about concerning
women and people [students] of color.36
Steele’s work points to the psychological burdens that marginalized people
have endured as a result of the systemic and socialized ways that such groups
have been thought about throughout history. Consequently, certain groups
of people (e.g., women in mathematics) and their performance is linked to
their performance in domains that dominant groups have historically framed
as inferior. Where curriculum is concerned, teachers have often developed
these deficit theories about students of color based on the legacies that shape
particular groups’ performances. The curriculum, then, may be “watered
down” because teachers believe that groups of students are incapable of suc-
cess in some area of study. Interestingly, teachers may believe that they are
being supportive of students of color because they are lowering their expec-
tations and “dumbing down” the curriculum, when in reality they are hurt-
ing their students. This deficit thinking leads to incomplete, inaccurate, and
“lower” learning objectives and consequently discriminatory outcomes for
students of color and for all minorities.

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When Race Shows up in the Curriculum 157

METHODS IN TEACHER RACE REFLECTION FOR
CURRICULUM APPROPRIATION
Because of the complex nature of curriculum development and because
race may be such a central component in the nature of the curriculum, we
must think seriously about ways or methods teachers might use in their work
to begin to address some of these issues in the (or their) curriculum. We
suggest three activities that may prove effective: (a) racial identity assessment,
(b) race reflective journaling, and (c) critically engaged racial dialogue.

Racial Identity Assessment
Assessing one’s racial self-concept and understanding how it interacts with
other racess is an important consideration for teachers who may find them-
selves in diverse classrooms. Racial identity has direct implications for cur-
riculum development. We suggest that teachers address their racial identity
in order to uncover their biases and racial idiosyncrasies as they relate to
others. These often subconscious attitudes can result in low expectations for
non-white students, racially encapsulated curricula, and the perpetuation of
stereotypes. These issues and others, we believe, prohibit the potential of
teachers to meet the educational needs of all students. Racial identity, we
assert, should be interjected into teacher preparation programs in addition
to courses in multicultural education. Race in the classroom begins with ra-
cial self-consciousness.
We recommend that racial identity assessments be conducted periodically
for teachers. Ponterotto and Pedersen provide an excellent overview of ra-
cial and social identity theories and assessments.37 These assessments can be
used to gauge the current level of racial self-awareness of teachers and to
stimulate discussions regarding how race influences the student–teacher re-
lationship.

Race Reflective Journaling
Race reflective journaling is one method for teachers to think through their
experiences (past and present) around race. Race reflective journaling requires
teachers to reflect on the racial influences of and on their work. By journaling,
teachers might uncover aspects of who they are as racial beings. Such journaling
does not have to be systematic. Instead, it might involve teachers writing down
specific experiences relative to race when the opportunities and issues present
themselves, and it may require that they use introspection to try to make sense
of situations where their racial experiences are concerned. Ideally, teacher edu-
cators might introduce this notion of race reflective journaling in teacher edu-
cation programs, and teachers will continue implementing (again, ideally) the
practice into their daily work with students.

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158 Defending Public Schools

Because some teachers may find it difficult to reflect in this manner,
teacher educators might find it helpful to develop tools that facilitate this
type of reflection for their own (as teacher educators) and their students’
(practicing and potential teachers’) benefit. This may be especially impor-
tant when teachers have not reflected in this manner in the past and when
teachers even wonder about the appropriateness and necessity of this race
reflection. To be clear, we are suggesting that instead of teacher educators
requesting that teacher candidates and in-service teachers reflect in a gen-
eral sense, there needs to be more emphasis placed on race and tools and
typologies in order to make this happen. The writing/journaling approach
could be most effective because it provides a “safe space” for teachers to think
through often uncomfortable, complex, and challenging issues pertinent to
race, so that they might be ready to discuss with or expose themselves as and/
or to a group.
Several questions relative to curriculum development and enactment vis-
à-vis race might be considered:

• How might my race influence the curriculum (or more specifically what students
have the opportunity to learn)?
• How might my students’ racial experiences influence their learning opportuni-
ties and their interactions with me (as teacher)?
• What is the impact of race on my beliefs around the curriculum?
• How do I, as a teacher, situate myself in the curriculum? And, how do I negoti-
ate the power structures and knowledges relevant to what students have the op-
portunity to learn?
• How might racial influences impact my and students’ interests in the classroom?
How might I enact the curriculum to address those interests? and
• How do I situate and negotiate students’ knowledge, experiences, expertise, and
race with my own? In what ways do I incorporate this negotiation in the cur-
riculum?

Critically Engaged Racial Dialogue
In addition to having race reflective journaling to address race in the cur-
riculum, teachers may find it effective to engage in what we call “critically
engaged racial dialogue.” This method of “speaking about” or “talking
through” racial issues and experiences (both positive and negative) could be
a method that allows teachers to engage in conversations that they may not
feel comfortable engaging in otherwise. This type of racial dialogue, addi-
tionally, could occur in small groups in teacher education courses or in larger
group settings, such as discussion within whole classes. Teacher educators
may find that teacher candidates and in-service teachers alike find it more
effective to engage in this type of conversation in small groups, initially, as
there may otherwise be levels of discomfort around such conversations. More
important, teacher educators must promote spaces where students feel com-

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When Race Shows up in the Curriculum 159

fortable to have these conversations.38 There is little room for antagonism—
classes of individuals who blame others for years of racism or oppression that
emerge from a myriad of experiences, persons, and institutions. Ideally, these
conversations will lead teachers to pursue such discussions in their respec-
tive schools and classrooms. For such conversations have to start someplace,
and the most obvious place seems to be in teacher preparation courses.
This type of dialogue has to be couched in teachers’ experiences regard-
ing their lives with respect to race. Here, hooks makes an important point
where issues of voice, lived experience, and perspective are concerned:

As a teacher, I recognize that students . . . enter classrooms within institutions
where their voices have been neither heard nor welcomed, whether these stu-
dents discuss facts—those that any of us might know—or personal experience.
My pedagogy has been shaped to respond to this reality. If I do not wish to
see these students use the “authority of experience” as a means of asserting
voice, I can circumvent this possible misuse of power by bringing to the class-
room pedagogical strategies that affirm their presence, their right to speak, in
multiple ways on diverse topics.39

In this instance, experience is pedagogical and social theory. While in teacher
education programs in higher education we want our students to couch their
views and perspectives in theory/research-based arguments, we must recog-
nize that students’ life experiences in terms of race and context will be foun-
dational in developing more appropriate thinking and actions in preK–12
classrooms. Moreover, lived experience may be all that teachers have to rely
on in light of the small number of studies that use race as a theoretical and
empirical framework. The related questions may also be effective in guiding
conversations around race and the curriculum as teachers engage in notions
of critically engaged racial dialogue.

CONCLUSIONS
In short, we believe that teachers need to develop the skills and
knowledges necessary to reflect on their own experiences where race and the
curriculum are concerned. Strategies for introspection could lead teachers
to place a greater emphasis on racially inclusive classroom contents and prac-
tices. Interventions addressing color blindness and assumptions of
Eurocentric universality could prove effective as teachers grapple with ways
to better meet the needs of racially diverse students (pedagogically and philo-
sophically).
Indeed, students of color often operate in classrooms around the country
that do not meet their affective, social, and intellectual needs.40 As a result,
many of these students become educationally marginalized, which exacer-
bates achievement gaps and myths of anti-intellectualism in non-white com-
munities, especially African American and Hispanic communities. However,

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160 Defending Public Schools

the explication of race-based educational disparities infrequently includes
discussions about the characteristics of teachers, such as their racial identi-
ties and racial attitudes. This chapter has attempted to shed light on this
oversight and suggests strategies for increasing the awarenesses of race in the
discourse of and on curriculum development. We framed our arguments
purposefully in an urgent and pressing manner. With the ever-widening
achievement gaps and their social and economic implications, educators can
no longer afford to focus solely on the characteristics of the student with-
out focusing on the characteristics of the teacher. That is our major, essential
point.

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— 12 —

Critical Multicultural Social
Studies in the Borderlands:
Resistance, Critical Pedagogy,
and la lu cha for Social Justice
MARC PRUYN, ROBERT HAWORTH,
AND REBECCA SÀNCHEZ

In this chapter, we explore our attempted use of a critical pedagogy for so-
cial justice within both the social studies teacher education courses we teach
and within the K–12 classrooms where we most recently worked as teach-
ers. We will review historically the foundations of the critical pedagogy move-
ment and then lead readers empirically through our attempts to bring these
notions of a critical pedagogy for social justice to our classrooms of both
K–12 and preservice learners in our diverse US/México Borderlands of
Southern New Mexico.1
Marc began working as a bilingual public school teacher in the Salvadoran
refugee neighborhood of Los Angeles known as Pico-Unión in 1987. He
taught and learned at Magnolia Avenue Elementary for nine years. During
his initial years as a teacher, he was driven to find a pedagogy that would be
socially and culturally relevant to his students and to himself, a pedagogy that
would allow him to go beyond the “banking” and teacher-centered ap-
proaches prevalent at the time. He was advised by colleagues going through
similar professional struggles to read Paulo Freire’s hallmark work, Pedagogy
of the Oppressed.2 He then began using Freire’s ideas in his own work with
both public school students and, later, with preservice teachers.
Rob grew up in Southern California. He taught in public schools, work-
ing in special education, alternative secondary schools, and secondary social
studies classrooms. Currently, he is a doctoral student and teaches social
studies pedagogy courses in the teacher education program (TEP) of his

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162 Defending Public Schools

institution. His current research involves youth culture, pedagogy, and how
youth make meaning of the world outside of the classroom.
Rebecca is a native of the frontera in Southern New Mexico. She worked
as a teacher for four years in a local public school, predominantly with
Mexican immigrant and Mexican American students. She is a graduate of the
same TEP program in which she now teaches, one that emphasizes critical
multiculturalism. Rebecca dedicated herself to exploring democratic and
empowering pedagogical practices in the classroom as a result of her expe-
riences as both a student in this program and as a classroom teacher. Also
turning to Paulo Freire for inspiration, she drew upon students’ experiences
and critical inquiry as a basis for instruction.
Individually and collectively, in our separate teaching and learning experi-
ences, and in our shared work as teacher educators, we have tried to explore
a pedagogy of possibility that draws on the work of Freire and other social
justice activists. How successful have we been in this endeavor? That is what
this chapter is about. In the following pages, we share and critique our ex-
periences as critical educators (still—and hopefully continually—in forma-
tion). These experiences are drawn from our work with both K–12
youngsters and with adults (preservice teachers).3 But we do not feel this is
enough. Now, more than three decades after the first publication of Freire’s
Pedagogy of the Oppressed in English, and as his final books published in
English are enjoying unprecedented popularity,4 we seek here to re-explore
the work and legacy of Paulo Freire and reflect on how his ideas have influ-
enced how we teach and how we have come to understand our pedagogical
work through the lens of “critical multicultural social studies” (CMSS). We
would like to remind the reader, and ourselves, of some of the original no-
tions Freire outlined and hold them up as if to a mirror, a counterpoint, to
our analyses of our pedagogical practices.

THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL ROOTS:
FREIRE, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND SOCIAL STUDIES
El Abuelito: Paulo Freire
To some, Paulo Freire was a critical theorist, to others, a radical resistance
theorist, and to yet others, a neo-Marxist revolutionary. We feel he was all
these things. As McLaren puts it, “the work of Brazilian educator Paulo
Freire places him in the front ranks of that ‘dying class’ of educational revo-
lutionaries who march behind the banner of liberation to fight for social
justice and educational reform.”5 Freire was born into a middle-class family
in Recife, Brazil, on September 19, 1921. He and his family later fell into
poverty as the Great Depression sent shock waves throughout Latin America
and the entire world. He taught from the 1940s through 1964 in Brazil,
and at one time served as the director of the National Literacy Campaign.

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Critical Multicultural Social Studies in the Borderlands 163

When the military leaders of a United States–backed coup d’état came into
power in 1964, he was accused of being a “subversive”—for teaching peas-
ants how to read and write—and imprisoned for two months before being
sent into exile. He briefly stayed in Bolivia but then settled in Chile, where
he made his home with his wife Elza and their five children until 1970. While
in Chile, he taught at the University of Santiago, was a UNESCO consult-
ant with the Agrarian Reform Training and Research Institute, and did lit-
eracy work for elected socialist president Salvador Allende—who was later
overthrown by another United States–sponsored coup in 1973. In 1969,
Freire was appointed to Harvard University’s Center for the Study of De-
velopment and Social Change, and in 1970 he and his family moved to
Switzerland so Freire could work as a consultant to the office of education
of the World Council of Churches. He returned from exile to Brazil in 1981
to teach at the Pontifica Universidade Católica de São Paulo. He later served
as the Minister of Education in São Paulo.6 He died in 1997.
Freire believed that we must realize our potential, our vocation, to be-
come more fully human. He noted that “Humanization . . . man’s [sic]7
vocation . . . is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the vio-
lence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for
freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity.”8
This process, the recovery of our “lost humanity,” is not only a means to
an end—the end being the ability to read and transform our reality—but it
is also a means to a means: it’s a process. And this process, the thinking about
thinking, the action with reflection, is the changing. This is a process that,
once begun, is ongoing. According to Freire, thus begins the development
of conscientization.
“Reading the world,” says Freire, “always precedes reading the word, and
reading the word continually implies reading the world.”9 Reading the world
means seeing and understanding one’s world, one’s reality, and reading the
word means applying this world understanding to one’s written word, one’s
literacy. Freire believed that this should be done simultaneously. He com-
mented that “Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word
of language; rather it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the
world.”10 Reading the world and the word simultaneously is dialogical cul-
tural action. This action is a liberating and humanizing approach to be used
by teachers and revolutionaries. This type of action and teaching puts the
teacher/student/revolutionary together with the community so that all work
jointly in reading their collective world and word in order to transform their
oppressive realities.
“Dialogical communication [and education],” notes McLaren, “should
prompt educators to draw upon the cultural capital of the oppressed in or-
der to allow the oppressed to ‘read’ the world in both immediate and wider
contexts.”11 Critical and investigative teaching and learning of this nature
are at the heart of Paulo Freire’s educational method. Learning to read and

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164 Defending Public Schools

write one’s world and word through dialogic pedagogical experiences is also
intimately tied to the development of one’s critical consciousness, or
conscientization. Conscientization is “learning to perceive social, political, and
economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements
of reality. . . . The role of critical pedagogy is not to extinguish tensions. The
prime role of critical pedagogy is to lead students to recognize various ten-
sions and enable them to deal effectively with them.”12 This, according to
Freire, is conscientization; this is “critical consciousness.”13

Using Freire in New Ways: Critical Multicultural
Social Studies
There is a growing body of literature detailing the importance and occa-
sional inclusion of critical multicultural themes in social studies education.14
This work, however, remains in the distinct minority within mainstream so-
cial studies and educational journals15 and organizations.16
The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) offers a definition
of the “primary purpose” of social studies that many in the criticalist tradi-
tion of social education would consider “conservative.”17 They hold that the
main goal of social studies is to “help . . . young people develop the ability
to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of
a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”18 We
believe that the goal of social studies (and education more generally) should
involve much more than simply assisting “young people [in] develop[ing]
the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as
citizens . . .”19 While this is laudable, it does not go nearly far enough. We
have always understood social studies as the study of social interaction be-
tween human beings, and between human beings and their socially con-
structed environments. In drawing from critical pedagogy and multicultural
education,20 we hold that social studies should have as one of its central
objectives the development of students who are not solely “informed citi-
zens” but also cultural, political, social activists who are encouraged to mani-
fest their beliefs with the ultimate goal of fighting oppression and furthering
social justice, that is, a social studies guided by critical pedagogy.21
Several researchers/theorists within the social studies community have
specifically called for combining critical pedagogy and social studies. Alquist
holds that it is only through a “critical social studies” that we can foster
“moral critical thinking” within both teacher education and K–12 students.
This approach must be “interdisciplinary, global in perspective, contextual,
controversial, and help students employ critical thinking to solve real prob-
lems.”22 Poindexter posits that democratic values will be fostered through
an approach to social studies education that emphasizes social justice and
equity.23 Seixas advances the notion that we should move beyond the no-
tion of the teaching of “social studies” to one of teaching “cultural stud-

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Critical Multicultural Social Studies in the Borderlands 165

ies”—not just the study of culture, but the understanding and ability to
deconstruct and then reconstruct culture such that the ends of social jus-
tice are served—in the critical tradition of Stuart Hall.24 In more recent years,
the cutting edge theoretical and empirical work in the area of critical social
studies has been forwarded most notably by Kincheloe, Ross, and Hursh and
Ross.25
In addition to critical pedagogy, numerous researchers and theorists would
like to see the full inclusion of multicultural education in the social studies.
Houser’s research suggests that the use of multicultural literature within
social studies education can help to promote social development, “sociocul-
tural understandings,” and “critical self-examination” in teacher education
students.26 The research of both Titus and Boyle-Baise indicates that the
inclusion of multicultural educational themes in social studies curricula can
improve instruction and raise student interest.27 So the notion of combin-
ing within social studies education approaches and content from critical peda-
gogy and multicultural education—critical multicultural social studies or
CMSS—is not new, although some argue that “mainstream” social studies
organizations tend toward the more conservative approach of teaching “citi-
zenship” over social activism.28
It is from these researchers, theorists, and traditions—beginning with
Freire—that we have been drawing in our own teaching (in terms of con-
tent and pedagogy more broadly) and that now informs our pedagogical
work in social studies and social justice.

WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD:
CONNECTING THEORY AND PRACTICE
We teach and study in the Chihuahuan borderlands of the southwestern
United States—where the states of Chihuahua, New México, and Texas con-
verge across history, politics, geography, language, conquest, and time. All
three of us are instructors in the teacher education program at our institu-
tion. We were all previously public school teachers. And we all learn with
and from each other and our colleagues within our department in the col-
lege of education (in the sense of being “students/teachers” and “teachers/
students” and members of a learning and cultural community of praxis). In
this section of our paper, we share insights we have gained through our ex-
periences as teachers (of adults and young people alike) in trying to imple-
ment CMSS and a social education for social justice.

“Throw Out the Paradigms, Theories, and Political
Agendas”: Marc’s Experiences as a Professor
Jonathan, a former conservative military man—now with long hair, worn
Levi’s, and a liberal political orientation—was a student in Marc’s teacher-

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166 Defending Public Schools

education social studies pedagogy course. Two-thirds of the way through the
seventeen-week semester, he raised his hand and asked, with a wry grin on
his unshaven face, “Dr. Pruyn, when do we start learning about social stud-
ies?” This was during Marc’s first year as a professor. Because of his attempted
focus within social studies on critical multiculturalism, he has been often
accused of “hating whites” and even of being a “race traitor.” Several years
later, a student actually rose and unabashedly asked the doctoral student
(working with Marc) teaching one of our social studies education sections,
“What does race have to do with social studies?” Indeed.
In analyzing the data29 from Marc’s preservice students over an eight-year
period, it appears that many more of them accepted rather than rejected
Marc’s attempts at promoting social justice through CMSS (by a ratio of 4:1).
But those who comprised the numerical minority, the “resistors,” often pur-
ported to speak for a great silent majority of students. Whether this was
completely accurate in terms of representation (analyses of the data seem to
challenge the veracity of this), they did so quite vociferously. And they “re-
sisted” in several ways. First, they often objected to the content of the course.
The alternative histories30 and themes of critical multiculturalism, language,
ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual orientation were often points of conten-
tion for this group. They often felt that Marc was “white bashing,” “male
bashing,” and “America bashing” through his inclusion of these opposing/
differing ways of viewing North American history and social events. These
mostly white, female, middle-class students seemingly felt that issues of ethnic
and gender oppression had no bearing on their own lives or in the lives of
their future students. Many even indicated that such concerns were beyond
their own lived experiences.
The following lengthy, excerpted example from one student’s evaluation
of Marc’s course summarizes well the difficulty this small (albeit vocal) re-
sistors group had to a pedagogy that asked them to reflect on and then
coconstruct with the instructor a set of (hopefully) useful social studies
knowledges that would take into account the real capitalist/classist, racist,
sexist, and homophobic world in which we live:

• This class has been an excellent example of: how to waste students’ valuable and
limited time and effort; how to, sometimes not very subtly, impose one’s values
on students; how to present questionable and/or false information to students
as fact; how to inspire resentment and ill feelings—an “us vs. them” atmosphere;
and, how to dismiss, challenge, and subject to ridicule certain viewpoints of many
students.
• . . . if this is asking too much, consider, at least, providing a more balanced se-
lection of required reading material and video selections. The reading material
was so heavily weighted toward the radical & liberal perspectives that each weeks’
[sic] assignments were nothing more than monotonous, boring, and redundant
wastes of our time . . .

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Critical Multicultural Social Studies in the Borderlands 167

• . . . Lastly, the best and most experienced teachers I have ever met and observed
are true educator[s], who illustrate the success of their teaching methods and
worthwhile curriculum content through their students’ academic and social suc-
cesses. They don’t know what a “paradigm” is, don’t know if they have one or not,
and they don’t care. Their first and foremost concern is the success of each indi-
vidual student—success achieved on their own and not on the back of someone
else. Throw out the paradigms, theories, and political agendas. Schools are better
off without them!! . . . (emphases Marc’s).

Analyses of these data appear to indicate that those students who were
resisting were doing so because they were being asked, in essence, to
resocialize themselves to a new way of learning—and this was, perhaps for
some of them, too overwhelming a challenge. Toward the end of each se-
mester, even some of the more resistant and conservative students indicated
that, while they benefited from the course, it was “difficult and new” for
them “to be taught and to learn in this student-centered way” that did not
tell them what to teach as future social studies teachers.
The majority of students (80 percent), the “supporters,” on the other
hand, would frequently speak out in favor of the alternative content and
approach Marc was attempting to use in the course, and would consistently
provide counterarguments to the resistors. But they would also report pri-
vately that they felt intimidated by the largely white and often “angry” re-
sistors.
The following student comments give voice to this majority of the stu-
dent body, the supporters, who felt positively about the way the course was
organized (both in terms of content and pedagogical approach):

• [The course] forced me to really consider topics that I have previously avoided.
It was comfortable and all opinions were [encouraged]. The information was
presented in a useful manner, and many ideas were given regarding classroom
implementation.
• Very positive! Dr. Pruyn is an excellent professor who respects [and] considers
other’s feelings! He gives us a lot of his own views, but lets us make our own
judgments and does so in a caring and respectful manner!
• I think [the instructor] was very open minded and listened to everyone’s ideas
even if they were different [from] his. He is the only professor I have had that
doesn’t give lower grades for expressing different opinions [from] theirs.
• I think Dr. Pruyn is a great instructor. I especially liked his points and [the] re-
spect which he had for us.

Another student shared that the pedagogy and content of this course
helped to broaden her social perspective as a preservice teacher:

I have probably never read this much in one semester. I’m glad I had a chance
to improve my vocabulary. However, I’m most happy about the fact that I have

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168 Defending Public Schools

expanded my knowledge on so many issues. These class discussions have helped
me both eliminate misconceptions about certain issues and also strengthen my
beliefs about others. I now feel I am a stronger person and I also know I have
a lot more research and learning to do. I am also excited to go and teach what
I have learned.

And what of students’ reactions to the inclusion of multiculturalism and
critical pedagogy as content areas—beyond what was shared in their evalua-
tions? Did the students accept the radical subject matter—a subject matter
that asked them to question their assumptions about life, oppression, and
potential liberation—offered in course readings and films?
When the students were asked what role multiculturalism should play in
the teaching of social studies, over 95 percent said it should play a central
role—indicating that even some of the resistors must have felt that certain
elements of multicultural education were appropriate. They made comments
in their surveys and course evaluations such as “multiculturalism should be
integrated into social studies” and “multiculturalism is social studies.” Two
students noted:

• Multiculturalism MUST have a major role in our teaching of social studies. Our
world is diverse, and students are diverse: we need to educate them about others
and we do need to recognize and respect differences! It’s a MUST!!!
• Keep up the good work and thank you for acknowledging us as “Mexican-Ameri-
can,” “Latinos” . . . thank you for the respect that we desperately need. . . .

When asked about the role critical pedagogy should play in social stud-
ies, over 53 percent felt it should play an important and substantive role.
They shared responses such as:

• It should be used to empower students. They should know that they can have a
positive impact on their communities.
• It should “challenge students to think critically about the information they re-
ceive from school, peers, T.V., family and community.”
• I have learned that being critical of things being taught is great. We need to look
at everything in a way that will not harm others.

It is, of course, a sign of hope that a strong and relatively sizable major-
ity of students represented in this qualitative documentary of Marc’s social
studies courses have been supportive of his attempts at CMSS. But this is
an ongoing and always challenging (and exhilarating!) pedagogical, cultural,
and political struggle, one that is still being developed, documented, and
analyzed. And it is a struggle that has been (and continues to be) attempted
by others, in different contexts and with variations of nuance, inspiration,
and success.

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Critical Multicultural Social Studies in the Borderlands 169

Next we share Rob and Rebecca’s experiences in teaching using CMSS
for social justice.

Rob and Rebecca: Lessons from Elementary School
to the University
Rob and Rebecca’s experiences with CMSS education in K–16 settings
have proved to be both challenging and successful. At the university-level,
they found it important to study the students’ backgrounds and experiences
in social studies classrooms. In two of the social studies methods classes that
they teach, they surveyed students regarding their own learning experiences
in schools as well as their feelings toward CMSS. Most respondents gave simi-
lar responses in terms of their own social studies/social justice experiences:
“It [social studies] was mostly memorizing names and dates”; “My social
studies teacher made us read the chapter and answer the review questions.”
One of Rob and Rebecca’s respondent’s even noted that one of his or her
social studies teachers made sure that students wrote out the review ques-
tions but “graded much of our work on penmanship.” These comments, and
the experiences they reflect, while troublesome, are far from uncommon.
Preservice teachers come to classes informed by critical multicultural so-
cial studies with many questions about the “magic formula” for instruction.
The beauty of CMSS lies in its illusive, nonformulaic, and contextually adapt-
able nature. Bill Bigelow, in his article entitled “Social Studies Standards for
What?” offers alternative suggestions for how students and teachers can
contextualize social studies differently:

1. Consistently seek out explanations for social phenomena and learn to distinguish
between explanation and mere perception.
2. Recognize how their individual actions affect human and biotic communities
throughout the world, reflecting on how every action they take has global so-
cial and ecological implications.
3. Question the ecological sustainability of key economic and cultural practices, and
consider alternatives to practices that are deemed unsustainable.
4. Evaluate the role that racism has played—and continues to play—in shaping the
experiences of social groups, especially with respect to economic and political
power.
5. Appreciate the impact social movements have had in addressing injustice of all
kinds, and evaluate the effectiveness of those efforts.
6. See [how they are] capable, both individually and collectively, of contributing
to social and ecological betterment.31

From these six suggestions, we would like to turn the discussion to how
preservice teachers and teachers in the field engage in social studies and so-
cial justice work (or do not). Acknowledging differences of ideology and

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170 Defending Public Schools

practice is an important element in seeking out and understanding the dif-
ficulties of implementing CMSS. Teachers and students become empowered
in a classroom environment that is participatory, dialogic, and reflective. In
spite of the benefits of using CMSS, many teachers continue to resist and
rely on a pedagogy of regimentation. What prevents teachers from engag-
ing in critical pedagogical practices under the guise of CMSS? The follow-
ing section describes some common sentiments about CMSS and a discussion
about how to integrate the approach.

Using a CMSS Pedagogical Approach Is Difficult
and Too Time Consuming!
This is a valid concern. Critical multicultural education in any subject can
be challenging. School districts provide textbook materials, standards, and
curriculum guides that map out an entire school year for a teacher. Many
teachers are comfortable utilizing the same textbook-driven curriculum that
shaped their own education, even if such an approach is boring or meaning-
less to today’s students. CMSS requires the constant shaping and construc-
tion of curriculum based on the diversity of the classroom. Our experiences
have informed us that CMSS, while intense, is rewarding for both the stu-
dents and the teacher.
In our classroom experiences with students from kindergarten through
high school, we have found that opening up discussions to students allows
for greater participation. In his book Empowering Education: Critical Teach-
ing for Social Change, Ira Shor describes how dialogic pedagogy (a corner-
stone of CMSS) redefines educational power structures and allows democratic
instruction and learning to occur.32 Conversations and observations by the
students in our classrooms indicate several things about critical multicultural
social studies education. First, students are able to identify and discuss com-
plex issues and problems through dialogue. Second, through critical inquiry,
they are able to make sense of what is happening in their own lives and also
in the larger community. The students are prepared for action to become
players in their own lives and to counter the hegemonic discourses surround-
ing them outside of the classroom. Initially, the dialogue process may ap-
pear foreign to students. They are reluctant to speak up because, for many,
it is the first time they have been asked and given the forum to participate.
After a time, they open up and begin the process of educational reclama-
tion. The energy created by the students is an energizing force for us as teach-
ers.

What About “Standards”?
Preservice teachers and teachers in the field often argue that “standards”
and “benchmarks” prevent them from implementing CMSS. As profession-

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Critical Multicultural Social Studies in the Borderlands 171

als, we have read the standards and we recognize the flexibility, creativity,
and possibility that exist within them. However, standards should not con-
trol classrooms, classrooms should control standards. For example, one of
our state social studies standards in New Mexico for all grades is that stu-
dents are required to make and understand connections among historical
events, eras, and people. In many classrooms, this standard is taught us-
ing the traditional textbook approach. “It was mostly memorizing names
and dates” is a response many of us can relate to from our own K–12 his-
tory courses. Howard Zinn and many other historians have used the term
“address book history” to describe this pedagogical practice of memori-
zation.33 This term can also be connected to Freire’s “banking education,”
which was discussed earlier in this chapter. Unfortunately, this has been the
ongoing practice of social studies in our public schools in order to accom-
modate the standards. Understanding this, we encourage our classes of
preservice teachers to reflect critically on mainstream history, to investigate
other contributors, to identify what the not-mentioned (e.g., women, Af-
rican Americans, Latinas/Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, working-class
folks, lesbians/gays/bisexuals/transsexuals, etc.) were doing during any
given period. These learning experiences are well within the “objective”
benchmark described above, but students are exposed to a more meaningful
and connected history. The connections from these investigations
contextualize and add meaning to contemporary realities and dilemmas
observed by students.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Marc received an e-mail several years ago from a former CMSS supporter.
She had entered the course as a self-identified “non-political Hispanic” (as
someone who drew her cultural heritage more from Europe and Iberia than
from México, more white than Raza). Throughout the semester that she
was in Marc’s class, he saw her slowly evolve into a more engaged political
being. In her e-mail, she informed him that she had learned much from the
course and the experiences they collectively shared as part of it. These ex-
periences had caused her, she wrote, to reflect on her ethnic, linguistic, and
class backgrounds more deeply than she ever had before and that she felt a
need to act to make the world a better place, for Raza (Mexican Americans
and Latinas/Latinos more generally) and for all people. Indeed, although
she was licensed and working as a bilingual elementary school teacher in New
México, she wanted to go on to earn a law degree so that she could affect
the lives of more people than she felt she could as a teacher. She asked Marc
for a letter of recommendation. He, of course, supplied one. But what struck
him most about this exchange was the automatic signature line she included
on the bottom of her e-mail, along with her address and phone number. It
read: “¡Xicana to the Bone!” This originally self-identified “non-political

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172 Defending Public Schools

Hispanic” had become a Chicana, a Chicana who wanted to fight for social
justice not just in the classroom,but in the legal system.
This gives us hope in our continued use of (and reflection upon, and
modification of, and praxis around) a critical multicultural social studies for
social justice, a social studies influenced by critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire,
and the desire to create collectively a world based in and on mutually infor-
mative notions of love, dignity, respect, and justice for all seres humnaos. And
wherever we are struggling as a community of preservice teachers/instruc-
tors in the United States, or as second graders living in poverty in Brazil,
we should keep in mind something else compañero Freire has noted: “Free-
dom is acquired by conquest, not by gift.”34

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— 13 —

Schooling and Curriculum
for Social Transformation:
Reconsidering the Status
of a Contentious Idea
WILLIAM B. STANLEY

Cultural transmission is fundamental to the survival of human society. In-
deed, the capacity for cultural transmission is the distinguishing characteris-
tic of the species. Of all the many sources of cultural knowledge, schooling
is the most systematic and formal institution of cultural transmission. School-
ing is compulsory, supported by taxation, and regulated by state and fed-
eral departments of education. Education credentials and the curriculum
taught in K-12 schools are subject to government (federal, state, and local)
review and approval. For most people, then, cultural transmission is the major
purpose of schooling.
Given the reality described above, it is reasonable to ask why it might be
justifiable to advocate for an approach to education as cultural transforma-
tion. One response to this question might be that social change is an un-
avoidable and inevitable feature of all human societies. At some level of social
change, educators (as a result of internal or external forces) will be pressured
to reconsider the value of the current curriculum and how it might be
changed to address the new social reality.
However, we must distinguish between educational reforms enacted to
address social change and those advocating education for social transmission.
The former has occurred throughout history (e.g., education to help assimi-
late new waves of immigrants, promote racial integration, serve the inter-
ests of students with special needs, improve public health, combat drug abuse,
prepare students to use new technologies, and increase American economic
productivity in the face of foreign competition). None of these goals (with

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174 Defending Public Schools

the possible exception of desegregation) promoted radical social change. In
such instances, social change has led to educational reform.
In contrast, education for social transformation reverses the process by
advocating the use of education to bring about fundamental changes in and
to the social structure. Perhaps the most obvious examples of social trans-
formation have occurred during revolutions. One can understand the po-
tential for revolutions (for better or worse) to bring about radical social
change, but it is more difficult to conceive of public education, an institu-
tion that normally serves to transmit the dominant culture, as the source of
social transformation. As noted earlier, it is far more likely that social change
will result in the transformation of K-12 schooling by powerful social groups
rather than the reverse.
Nevertheless, support for an approach to education for social transforma-
tion has persisted as a minority voice in curriculum reform debates through-
out much of the last century. Proponents of social transformation have largely
been on the Left politically. Not surprisingly, the criticism of education for
social transformation has most often (but not exclusively, as we will see) been
a conservative critique. However, some have argued that the current stan-
dards-based education reform (SBER) movement is an instance of conser-
vative social transformation in terms of its focus on a conservative version
of “official knowledge” and its neglect of, if not hostility toward, strong
forms of deliberative democracy. It is the continuing tension between con-
servative and progressive visions of education for social transformation that
is the focus of this chapter.1
Although the views expressed here can be applied to educational reform
in general, my primary focus is on social studies education, the curriculum
area most concerned with citizenship education and social theory. First, I
summarize the genesis and development of progressive arguments to use
schooling for social transformation. Social reconstructionists, a relatively small
but influential group on the left wing of the progressive education move-
ment, were the most vocal proponents of social transformation. Second, I
examine the role of ideology and theories of knowledge, as each bears on
the issue of social transformation. In particular, I want to illustrate why
schooling can never be fully neutral or apolitical and what follows from that
assumption. Third, I summarize Dewey’s critique of the social re-
constructionist position to use education for social transformation via a pro-
cess of countersocialization. Dewey’s critique illustrates the deep divisions
among progressives and remains relevant as a basis for criticizing current
proposals for a critical pedagogy based on countersocialization. Fourth, I
explore the theoretical dimensions of the current conservative cultural and
political restoration as these relate to and challenge progressive views of edu-
cation and education reform, especially vis-à-vis the current conservative
critique of social studies education as it relates to education for democracy.
Fifth, I critique progressive arguments for countersocialization as the pre-

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 175

ferred progressive approach to education for social transformation. Finally,
I suggest an alternative progressive approach to curriculum and education
policy.

ORIGINS OF PROGRESSIVE APPROACHES TO
EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
The general failure of K-12 schooling to have a significant impact on the
dominant social order has given credence to progressive and radical educa-
tors who have long argued that our schools are deliberately organized to help
preserve or achieve a conservative cultural, social, and economic agenda.
Nevertheless, there have been occasions in our history (the depression in the
1930s is perhaps the best example) when, in the face of significant social
change, a large segment of society lost faith in the existing social institutions
and was open to a consideration of radical proposals for change. At such
times, the public has been somewhat more receptive to proposals by pro-
gressive educators and their supporters who have promoted an educational
program for the purposes of helping create a new and improved social or-
der along more egalitarian and democratic lines.
The roots of the progressive vision of education for social transformation
can be traced to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Historian Herbert
Kliebard provides an excellent account of how a curriculum tradition for
social meliorism emerged in the decades following the Civil War.2 The so-
cial meliorists were located on the political Left and shaped by significant
intellectual developments in philosophy, science, and the new social sciences
(e.g., biology and Darwinism), pragmatism, psychology, and sociology. The
political goals of social meliorism were promoted by progressive political
movements, which emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
tury. The Progressive Education Association (PEA), founded in 1919, was
a response by progressive educators to institutionalize the social meliorist
mandate to use education for transformation of the current social order.
Although progressive educators were generally on the liberal, or Left,
politically, the PEA never reached consensus on the best approach to edu-
cation reform. The influential “child-centered” wing of the movement dis-
claimed any social or political agenda and argued that the child’s interests
should be the central concern of education. As the president of the PEA
explained in 1930, “Although our association has never promulgated or
approved anything like a program . . . we do endorse, by common consent,
the obvious hypothesis that the child rather than what he [sic] studies should
be the center of all educational effort and that the scientific attitude toward
educational ideas is the best guarantee of progress.3
In stark contrast, the social reconstructionist faction on the far left wing
of the PEA were the most outspoken proponents of using educational pro-
grams for radical social transformation. At the annual meeting of the Pro-

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176 Defending Public Schools

gressive Education Association in 1932, George Counts, a leading social
reconstructionist, gave a provocative talk entitled “Dare the School Build a
New Social Order?” The audience sat in stunned silence when the talk ended.
Counts had been a student of Albion Small, an early advocate of the social
meliorist position in curriculum theory. He believed that the impact of the
Great Depression in the 1930s demonstrated that our society was in a state
of crisis and argued for the creation of a new social order based on a funda-
mental redistribution of economic and political power. His goal was to push
progressive education reform as a way to radicalize American society.
In 1932, such power was largely held by a relatively small class or group.
Until this was changed, “the survival or development of a society that could
in any sense be called democratic is [or was] unthinkable.” Counts claimed
that the capitalist economy of the United States would either have to be
eliminated “or changed so radically in form and spirit that its identity will
[or would] be completely lost.” Counts’s economic views gradually moder-
ated over time. He eventually came to accept the retention of capitalism in
some form, which left room for an accommodation with various “liberal”
reform proposals. Yet Counts believed there was ample evidence to indict
capitalism on moral grounds, and the depression of 1929 provided evidence
of the profound failure of capitalism in economic terms.4
Counts admitted that progressive educators had accomplished much in
the first decades of the twentieth century. They were right to place more
emphasis on the interests of the child than did those who advocated a sub-
ject-centered curriculum, and they were correct when they argued that
“activity lies at the root of all true education.” Learning should, as the
progressives argued, be related to “life situations” and character development.
But, while this was an excellent beginning, it was not a sufficient program
for education. For an educational movement to be truly progressive “it must
have orientation; it must possess direction.” The very term progress implies
moving forward, and this “can have little meaning in the absence of clearly
defined purpose.” Thus, the chief weakness of progressive education was its
failure to develop a theory of social welfare, “unless it be that of anarchy or
extreme individualism.” Counts believed that the overemphasis on individu-
alism in our culture reflected the view of the upper middle class, many of
whom sent their children to progressive schools. The members of this class
seemed “entirely incapable of dealing with any of the great crises of our
time.” They had become too fond of their material possessions and, in a crisis,
would likely “follow the lead of the most powerful and respectable forces
in society and at the same time find good reasons for doing so.”5
Counts was also concerned with the pervasive influence of a philosophic
uncertainty in much progressive thinking, which functioned to block the
development of a theory of social welfare by promoting relativism under the
guise of objectivity and academic freedom. Counts believed that philosophic

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 177

uncertainty, combined with the instrumentalism of most progressives and the
narrow scientific approach of other educators, had resulted in the general
tendency to avoid resolving pressing social problems.
It was necessary, therefore, for progressive educators to free themselves
from philosophic relativism and the undesirable influences of an upper-
middle-class culture. Such freedom would permit the development of “a
realistic and comprehensive theory of social welfare” and “a compelling and
challenging vision of human destiny.” The construction of an educational
program oriented by such a vision and theory of social welfare would also
entail freeing progressive education from its apparent fear of imposition and
indoctrination. Put another way, progressive educators must come to accept
“that all education contains a large element of imposition, that in the very
nature of the case this is inevitable, that the existence and evolution of soci-
ety depend upon it, that it is consequently eminently desirable, and that the
frank acceptance of this fact by the educator is a major professional obliga-
tion.”6
Counts contended that our schools, oriented by a new, truly progressive
curriculum, could and should be in the vanguard of a movement to make
fundamental changes in our political and economic system. The new curricu-
lum should be designed to expose the antidemocratic limitations of a mar-
ket economy and promote a more collectivist economy to reduce disparities
of income and wealth and a strong version of participatory democracy.7
While the reconstructionists reflected the shift toward the political Left
during the 1930s, most orthodox Marxists, and the American Communist
Party in particular, rejected their position as naïve, since schooling was a tool
of the capitalist political structure. Marxists in the 1930s were certainly not
opposed to using the schools to promote their political agenda. However,
they believed that the social order itself would need to be changed by di-
rect political action before any real change in education could take place.
The reconstructionist legacy prompted a significant conservative back-
lash in the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the banning of, and in sev-
eral cases groups publicly burning, copies of reconstructionist Harold
Rugg’s highly popular social studies textbook series for its allegedly anti-
American content. The intense patriotic impact of World War II, followed
by the repressive political climate promoted by the Cold War and Senator
Joseph McCarthy in the late 1940s and 1950s, had a chilling effect on
progressive education, prompting the firing of many K-12 teachers and
professors in higher education and suppressing the expression of liberal and
radical ideas in teaching and curriculum materials. Although the progres-
sive legacy regained some influence in the 1960s and early 1970s, the past
three decades have been marked by a conservative restoration that has been
motivated by a generally successful effort to discredit the entire (liberal to
radical) progressive legacy.

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178 Defending Public Schools

THE ROLE OF IDEOLOGY AND THEORIES OF
KNOWLEDGE IN EDUCATION REFORM
The current SBER movement is only the most recent example of a long
struggle to determine “what” and “whose” knowledge is of most worth in
the process of curriculum development and teaching. The approach taken
when answering such questions will always have a direct impact on educa-
tion policy, curriculum, classroom practice, and the design of teacher edu-
cation programs. Central to the struggle over the K–12 curriculum is the
critical relationship of knowledge and power. The power/knowledge rela-
tionship is captured in Orwell’s claim in 1984, that “Those who control the
past control the future. Those who control the present control the past.”
The power to determine the nature of schooling and the curriculum is a
direct concern of all political groups in our society.
Of course, some political groups have always had far more influence on
the shape of curriculum and instructional practice than others. Still, the re-
lationship of power to knowledge is rarely simple. Like Orwell, we gener-
ally tend to think in terms of the power to control knowledge, but Foucault
has called our attention to the intricate and complex relationship between
power and knowledge. For Foucault, just as power undoubtedly shapes the
social construction of knowledge, so too does knowledge shape how power
is employed.8
While political power and, on occasion, even brute force are employed
to shape public knowledge, Foucault described how indirect, discursive
methods have been far more influential in the production, reproduction, and
deployment of particular forms of knowledge and power. As defined by Fou-
cault, a “discourse” functions to determine the way we think and the very
boundaries of knowledge we might consider legitimate. Thus, a dominant
discourse will influence, often unconsciously, our conceptions of what knowl-
edge is, how knowledge might be produced, and what we should value when
constructing a K-12 curriculum.
The views expressed here are also influenced by the way ideology has been
employed by James Gee to illustrate how dominant school discourses bet-
ter serve the needs of certain groups of students as opposed to others. Ide-
ology refers to the complex set of ideas, symbols, beliefs, norms, customs,
and practices used to represent and legitimate cultural and social systems.
Defined this way, ideology is a fundamental component of any culture but
always something less than the totality of the culture it seeks to represent.
More specifically, ideology is generally used to legitimate “beliefs about the
appropriate distribution of social goods, such as power, prestige, status, dis-
tinction, or wealth. . . .”9
There is a pervasive tendency to view ideology in negative terms. Although
our negative conceptions of ideology have many origins, there are two de-
velopments in intellectual history that have played a major role in this re-

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 179

gard. First, Marxist theory has emphasized a view of ideology as “false con-
sciousness,” that is, a system of ideas and practices used by dominant groups
to control subordinate groups by making cultural and social conditions ap-
pear as natural, neutral, and normal. A second and related source of ideol-
ogy as a negative concept is the modern conception of science. For science,
reality is something we can discover and know by using scientific methods
of inquiry. Ideology would refer to unscientific conceptions of reality as
opposed to the “truth” or scientific description of reality.
We should recall that Marx believed his method for economic and social
analysis was scientific. In the current debates over educational reform, pro-
ponents of opposing positions (e.g., professionalism vs. the privatization of
schooling) usually claim their views are derived from research-based (scien-
tific) arguments and attempt to discredit opponents by describing their views
as merely ideological (i.e., not based on research). We need to examine both
of these positions (false consciousness and the scientific conception of the
realist) as each relates to the debate over education for social transforma-
tion.10
Clearly, we can conceive of situations wherein a person or group is a vic-
tim of false consciousness. But unless we define ideology as a tautology (i.e.,
ideology is a false conception of reality) and assume that we can always know
with certainty what social reality is at any given time (something I would
argue is impossible), the definition of ideology as false consciousness only
captures a limited version of how the concept can be applied to social in-
quiry. If we consider Gee’s description of ideology, we might also ask how
any social system could function absent some ideological dimension used to
justify its existence.
Consequently, while false consciousness is often a feature of a given soci-
ety or social group, ideology itself can never be reduced to mere false con-
sciousness because it is always a necessary component of any movement that
defends or seeks to undermine a social order. Protestations aside, both Marx-
ism and modern conceptions of science have an ideological dimension. The
point to keep in mind is that no one has the capacity to stand outside and
analyze society from a position that does not represent an ideological per-
spective. As such, ideology is something we, as human beings, cannot live
without. I am not asserting that we have no way to adjudicate knowledge
claims or that all knowledge claims are equal (a radical form of relativism or
even nihilism). I do claim, though, that humans have no access to certain
knowledge regarding such things as values, theories of social welfare, social
reality, and the reality that we assume exists independent of our knowledge
of it. What we do have as humans is the capacity to develop the competence
to make judgments concerning how we ought to live to maximize our po-
tential. Although such judgments are never certain, some are more defen-
sible than others.11

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180 Defending Public Schools

The view of ideology and social knowledge as I have described it also has
important implications for our conceptions of knowledge and education.
Both conservative and progressive educational theorists have tended to hold
a conception of knowledge developed during the Enlightenment. Although
challenged by various postpositivist theorists, the development of modern
science has enabled the Enlightenment conception of knowledge to become
the “taken-for-granted” view that shapes most educational discourse and
practice. This view of knowledge holds that reality has an independent, ob-
jective existence, which we can come to know (at least in part) through sci-
entific inquiry. It is this assumption of a scientific access to “truth” or an
“objective” account of reality that has become the bedrock for most curricu-
lum and educational reform discourse on both the Left and Right.12
The term science-based research is employed to support the No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) legislation and as a filter to determine which educational
research will be used to support the Bush administration’s educational ini-
tiatives. Progressive critics of NCLB generally claim that proponents of con-
servative education reform are motivated by ideology and promote an agenda
that is not, in fact, well supported by the best educational research; the con-
servative education reformers make the same claim against progressives. Both
Cochran-Smith and Simcox provide a helpful analysis of this discursive im-
passe.13
Because the conservative proponents of standards based reform assume
we can distinguish clearly between “real” knowledge and other more ancil-
lary goals, such as citizenship education, critical thinking, self-esteem, and
multiculturalism, they feel justified in enacting state and federal legislation
to shape K-12 curriculum and practice. Their progressive opponents claim
the conservatives have both the science and the social theory wrong and
believe we need to promote a counter reform to use education (among other
things) to discredit and reverse the current standards-based movement. The
more radical progressives would go further, recommending an educational
program for social transformation. Within this context, arguments for so-
cial transformation amount to what Engle and Ochoa describe as
countersocialization, an attempt to use education to bring about fundamental
changes in our economic and political systems. Although Engle and Ochoa
would accept a social welfare system that was characterized by strong forms
of participatory democracy and a more equal distribution of income and
wealth, certain Marxist educators argue that a truly democratic society is not
possible until we have abolished our current capitalist system.14
To the extent that one accepts the position described in the preceding
paragraphs, it follows that the task of education is not to eliminate ideology
or bias from analysis but to reveal how these essential elements of being
human work to shape our practice as educators and citizens in a democratic
society.15 Beyond that, we need to use education to cultivate the practical
competence required to function effectively as members of a democratic

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 181

society. Competence needed to function as a citizen in a democratic society
is not an educational “frill” but something essential to our full development
as humans. In contrast, arguments for a “scientific” (conceived as an objec-
tive and nonideological) approach to schooling should be greeted with a
great deal of skepticism, as they will always disguise as objective what, in fact,
is ideological.
In short, the arguments for social transformation via an educational pro-
gram promoting countersocialization (either progressive or conservative) are
ill conceived and even counterproductive. Accordingly, I reject the strong
form of the social reconstructionist education program promoted by Counts
and others. I continue the argument against social transformation as counter-
socialization in the next section, where I present an analysis of Dewey’s prag-
matic alternative to social reconstructionism.

DEWEY’S CRITIQUE OF THE SOCIAL
RECONSTRUCTIONIST POSITION
Given their radical political agenda, it is not surprising that conservatives
and even many liberals reacted negatively to the social reconstructionist re-
form proposals. But we might expect that Left-progressives like Dewey would
have supported a program to use the schools to help bring about democratic
social transformation. Dewey is often considered as part of the re-
constructionist movement.16 Dewey did agree that the school should have
a definite social orientation. As he stated, “[it] is not whether the schools
shall or shall not influence the course of future social life, but in what direc-
tion they shall do so and how.”17 He acknowledged that the way the schools
actually “share in the building of the social order of the future, depends on
the particular social forces and movements with which they ally.”18 Teach-
ers cannot escape the responsibility for assisting in the task of social change
(or maintenance), and this requires a particular social orientation. Accord-
ing to Dewey, education “must . . . assume an increasing responsibility for
participation in projecting ideas of social change and taking part in their
execution in order to be educative.” The changes espoused by Dewey and
Childs included a more just, open, and democratic society.19
Considering such sentiments, it is not surprising that Dewey has been
considered a social reconstructionist.20 Richard Rorty has argued that Dewey
at least exhibited a seeming ambivalence on this issue.21 However, it is a
mistake (or at least an oversimplification) to lump Dewey’s ideas with those
of reconstructionism, a point Dewey himself took great pains to make clear.
Although Dewey did believe that the schools should assist in the reconstruc-
tion of society, his view of this process differed significantly from that of
Counts. Rather than indoctrinating students with a particular theory of so-
cial welfare, Dewey wanted the schools to participate in the intellectualiza-
tion of society—in other words, the “method of intelligence” (i.e., equipping

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182 Defending Public Schools

students with the critical skills necessary for reflective thought applied to
analysis of social problems).22 For Dewey, the central aim of education was
“to prepare individuals to take part intelligently in the management of con-
ditions under which they will live, to bring them to an understanding of the
forces which are moving to equip them with the intellectual and practiced
tools by which they can themselves enter into direction of these forces.”23
Dewey’s insistence on a commitment to the method of intelligence was
posed as just that —a commitment to a method and not to any specific so-
cial outcome as a result of employing that method. He never suggested that
the schools should seek to indoctrinate students to promote a particular
theory of social welfare, although he realized that schools could not help
transmitting some social values. A key problem was the lack of any single
system of social values existing in complex modern society. To attempt to
indiscriminately follow all the values of the current society would be to aban-
don the method of intelligence.24
Dewey thought that educators had three basic choices. First, they might
accept the present state of social confusion and conflict and drift in an aim-
less fashion. Second, “they may select the new scientific, theological, and
cultural forces that are producing change in the older order; may estimate
the direction in which they are moving and their outcome if they are given
freer play, and what can be done to make the schools their ally.”25 The third
choice was the conservative option that strives to use the schools to help
maintain the old social order against forces of change. In this case, a choice
was made to support the values of the status quo that function to secure
special privileges for certain dominant groups. Dewey obviously rejected the
first and third choices and opted for the method of intelligence by which
the schools seek to help students acquire the understandings and insights to
enable them “to take part in the great work of construction and organiza-
tion that will have to be done, and to equip them with the attitudes and
habits of action that will make their understanding and insight practically
effective.”26
Dewey understood human intelligence as a capacity or competence to help
clarify and achieve desirable social ends. But a commitment to this approach
did not entail the recommendation of any particular social end save the nec-
essary social conditions under which the method might survive and be ap-
plied. Thus, Dewey would only recommend that teachers hold to an
orientation that emphasized the application of intelligence to social prob-
lems. This commitment to intelligence could be conceived as instrumental,
empirically grounded, and designed to draw tentative conclusions. To go
beyond that point would be indoctrination, which Dewey rejected.
Dewey was quite specific in his response to reconstructionist critics who
attacked his instrumental approach as neutral. He did not believe it was neu-
tral, mechanical, aloof, or “purely intellectual” in analyzing social conflict.
Those who had concluded that modern advances in science and technology

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 183

“were creating a new type of social conflict” did so not through indoctrina-
tion but by the “intelligent study of historical and existing forces and con-
ditions....”27 Dewey did believe that his method could not “fail...to support
a new general social orientation.”28 In this sense, indoctrination was unnec-
essary. In due time, the application of the method of intelligences would
reveal ways to improve the social order. “The upholders of indoctrination
rest their adherence to the theory, in part, upon the fact that there is a great
deal of indoctrination now going on in the schools, especially with reference
to narrow nationalism under the name of patriotism, and with reference to
the dominant economic regime. These facts unfortunately are facts. But they
do not prove that the right course is to seize upon the method of indoctri-
nation and reverse its object.”29
Dewey defined indoctrination as the “systematic use of every possible
means to impress upon [students] a particular set of...views to the exclusion
of every other.”30 This is a more extreme view than the interpretations of
indoctrination used by Counts and other reconstructionists who insisted on
the open access to information, even though new knowledge might contra-
dict the reconstructionist view of the “good society.” In contrast to more
authoritarian radical positions (e.g., orthodox Marxists who assumed they
had a monopoly on the truth), the deliberate suppression or distortion of
information was ruled out as a valid means of inculcation.
However, the limited reconstructionist qualifications regarding educational
indoctrination were not enough for Dewey. The only form of indoctrina-
tion he entertained was the assertion that the method of intelligence was the
preferred approach to education. “If the method we have recommended leads
teachers and students to better conclusions than those which we have
reached—as it surely will if widely and honestly adopted—so much the bet-
ter.”31 It is fair to say Dewey believed that any attempt to inculcate precon-
ceived conclusions regarding a preferred social order would ultimately work
to subvert the method of intelligence, even if the open access to alternative
views was maintained. Any such risk was not worth the effort, given Dewey’s
educational philosophy and optimism regarding the potential efficacy of his
method if fully applied. We will return to this important insight when we
examine more recent recommendations for progressive education as counter-
socialization.

CONSERVATIVE RESTORATION AND
EDUCATIONAL REFORM
These discussions emphasize that education has always been a site of ideo-
logical and political struggle, and reform movements and debates over cur-
riculum have been persistent phenomena throughout our nation’s history.
Curriculum is and should be contested terrain within a democratic society.
While the education reform debates between various conservative and

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184 Defending Public Schools

progressive groups have often been intense, until the last quarter of the twen-
tieth century there remained a general consensus regarding the importance
of public education to the survival of democratic society and the potential
capacity of our schools to help solve social problems.
The conservative approach to the discourse on education reform made
an important theoretical shift in the early 1980s. In part, this change repre-
sented an intensification of earlier movements emphasizing increased atten-
tion to accountability, teaching the basics, and instructional objectives, which
arose in the 1970s in response to the perceived excesses of the progressive
reforms in the 1960s. The hostile reaction of the 1960s and 1970s was an
earlier example of what we have more recently come to call the “culture
wars.” The 1970s also produced a significant decline in the level of public
support for many of our major institutions, including (among others) pub-
lic schools. With the election of President Ronald R. Reagan in 1980, the
stage was set for a new conservative restoration.32
The Reagan administration soon found an effective way to link education
reform to economic policy. The president and members of his administra-
tion used a “bully pulpit” strategy, including advocacy, speeches, and com-
mission reports to shape public opinion in support of a conservative
educational policy. Government officials also worked closely with private
foundations and think tanks to reshape the discourse on and public knowl-
edge of education. Consistent with the conservative ethos of the Reagan
administration, the escalation of education reform rhetoric coincided with
the reduction of federal spending on education.33
The single most influential report on education reform from this period
was A Nation At Risk, published by the National Commission on Excellence
in Education, which was established by Terrell Bell, Reagan’s first Secretary
of Education.34 The report had a dramatic rhetorical and political effect. It
was widely (and uncritically) promoted by the media. The Newsweek head-
line “Can Our Schools Be Saved?” was typical of the mainstream reaction.
The centerpiece of the new education reform rhetoric was the assertion that
America was a “nation at risk” as a direct result of the failure of our public
schools to educate our children properly. The failed public educational sys-
tem was blamed for the decline of our economy, particularly in relation to
Japan and Germany, as well as the corruption of our culture. Overnight, the
discourse on education reform had been transformed.
The Reagan administration managed to create the perception of an edu-
cational crisis that seemed to surpass the earlier Cold War education crisis,
which followed the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957.35 The publication of
the report coincided with a period of low public morale. The memories of
America’s military failure in Vietnam, followed by the oil crisis, stagflation,
and the Iran hostage situation, shaped the national consciousness at the start
of the 1980s. President James E. Carter had called our attention to an Ameri-
can “cultural malaise” shortly before leaving office. A Nation At Risk pro-

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 185

vided an appealing explanation for our perceived national decline. The re-
port claimed that “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce,
industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by com-
petitors throughout the world . . . [and the] educational foundations of our
society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens
our very future as a Nation and a people.”36
A Nation At Risk was soon followed by several similar reports from the
Education Commission of the States, the College Board, the Carnegie Foun-
dation, the National Science Board, and the Twentieth Century Fund. This
education crisis rhetoric, although exaggerated and incorrect in many ways,
formed the core of a conservative consensus (ideology) on education policy
that has maintained much of its original power over the past two decades.37
At the core of this ideology is the claim that a pervasive progressive and lib-
eral approach to K-12 education, which has overemphasized educational
equity at the expense of educational excellence, was the main reason for our
educational and economic decline in the last decades of the twentieth cen-
tury. Another important assumption in all these reports was that there is a
direct link between the level of K-12 student academic achievement (i.e., on
standardized test scores) and economic growth and competitiveness vis-à-
vis other industrialized nations. According to conservative critics, American
K-12 students were performing at lower levels than in the past and in com-
parison with students in other industrialized nations. These conservative
claims regarding a “crisis” in education soon achieved the status of “official
knowledge.”
This conservative discourse, led by numerous “think tanks” and public
intellectuals, was refined, expanded, and made more effective throughout the
1980s and 1990s. Terrance Bell, William Bennett, Harold Bloom, Lynne
Cheney, Dinesh D’Souza, Chester Finn, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and Dianne
Ravitch have been among the most prominent and influential of these con-
servative critics. The conservative argument has continued to expand to in-
clude increasing numbers of scholars in higher education, many of whom
are funded by conservative foundations and think tanks. The work of these
academics has provided an important theoretical and empirical research data-
base with which to underpin the claims of the conservative critique of pub-
lic education.38 A good summary of this work can be found in two edited
books published on the twentieth anniversary of A Nation At Risk.39 The
authors, with few exceptions, argue that the nation remains at risk and pro-
mote the conservative education reform agenda. Finally, in this respect and
others, one must also give credit to the powerful influence of conservative
talk-show hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh, who played (and continue to play)
a key role in helping to disseminate this SBER agenda and ideology.
The think tanks and foundations of most influence include the American
Enterprise Institute, the Fordham Foundation, the Free Congress Research
and Education Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute,

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186 Defending Public Schools

and the John F. Olin Foundation. Linda Simcox provides a good summary
of how such think tanks influenced educational policy. Ronald Reagan was
well aware of the importance of the conservative discourse as it related to
policy change, noting that “Ideas do have consequences, rhetoric is policy,
and words are action.” The success and persistence of the current SBER
movement is testimony to the continuing conservative dominance of edu-
cation reform discourse and policy.40

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITIQUE OF CITIZENSHIP
EDUCATION
Although the establishment of common public schools took most of the
nineteenth century to accomplish, Thomas Jefferson’s argument that a well
educated citizenry is essential to the survival of a democratic culture and
society now has a “taken-for-granted” quality for most people. While
Jefferson’s views regarding schools might seem self-evident, they also beg
the question, “What do we mean by democracy?” There is no consensus on
how to answer this, yet the way we define democracy is central to any argu-
ment to use our schools for social transformation. The current conservative
program for education reform is based on a more limited view of democ-
racy than Jefferson’s or that of most progressive educators. This point is criti-
cal to any understanding of the SBER movement, which should not be
reduced merely to an argument over standardization and standardized test-
ing.
Conservative critics of schooling have clearly grasped the potential inher-
ent in combining their attack on education in conjunction with the promo-
tion of their cultural and economic ideas. The conservative commitment to
a “culture war” was a conscious policy recommendation by the Free Con-
gress Research and Education Foundation’s report “Cultural Conservatism:
Toward a New National Agenda.” While the business community had always
had an interest in shaping public education, under the new SBER reform
agenda, corporate executives were invited to participate directly in the de-
velopment of educational policy.41

Neoliberal Theory and Education for Democracy
The conservative approach to education reform is deeply rooted in a set
of powerful theoretical and ideological assumptions that developed in the
mid-twentieth century and have been given increased legitimacy in the past
two decades. Frederic Hayek and Milton Friedman, both colleagues at the
University of Chicago in the 1950s, are among the best representatives of
the core conservative theory and ideology that has had an increasingly pow-
erful effect on educational reform. Hayek argued that our current social order
was a spontaneous and natural result of human evolution and had developed

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 187

the way it had for good reasons. In addition, human society was always far
too complex to permit the sort of knowledge one would need for any cen-
tral planning of our economy. Consequently, any attempt by government to
interfere with the natural (evolved) social order would only make things
worse.42
Hayek also argued that human values, like human intelligence, had evolved
over time as the result of the multitude of individual social actions and in-
teractions that take place. Thus, human liberty must always take precedence
over general claims to social welfare, inasmuch as individual liberty was (and
is) a prior condition for the creation of any concept of social welfare. For
Hayek, the liberal or progressive emphasis on the need for a conception of
“social justice” to drive public policy was among the most powerful threats
to individual liberty to emerge in modern civilization. In his view, the cur-
rent emphasis on social justice “inverts the original and authentic concept
sense of liberty, in which it is properly attributed only to individual actions.”43
Milton Freidman extended Hayek’s ideas to his own economic theory,
claiming that the original concept of liberalism had been corrupted in the
twentieth century and confounded with the actions of a central government
to improve the social welfare of its citizens. Such efforts were doomed to
fail. Like Hayek, Friedman argued that true liberty requires individual eco-
nomic freedom. A free market economy was inherently the best way to maxi-
mize both individual freedom and the potential of our social institutions,
including schooling.

The Dewey-Lipmann Debate over Education for Democracy
Dewey, of course, had rejected the assertion that a free market economic
system was an essential component of a successful democratic society. Indeed,
Dewey understood market economic theory as one of the major impediments
to the quest for instituting a strong version of deliberative democracy consis-
tent with his pedagogical theories. In contrast, the prominent journalist Walter
Lipmann argued in the 1920s that the complex nature of modern industrial
society, combined with the application of propaganda techniques through the
mass media, undermined Dewey’s conception of education to develop the
reflective citizenship skills required to participate fully in modern political pro-
cesses.44 Modern society was far too complex to permit meaningful participa-
tion on the part of the average citizen, who did not have the time, ability, or
access to acquire the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions regard-
ing the best policy to deal with important social issues. The most we might
hope for is to trust in the capacity of enlightened and competent political and
technocratic elites, the only groups in position to make informed social, eco-
nomic, and political decisions in the public interest.
While the average citizen could still play an important role in the political
process in terms of public opinion, pressure, and voting to elect or remove

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188 Defending Public Schools

politicians at the state and national levels, Lipmann had little faith in the
competence of the masses to make wise decisions on public policy. Robert
Westbrook, in his excellent and supportive biography of Dewey’s views on
democracy, argues that Lipmann got the better of Dewey in this debate.45
To the extent that Lipmann’s analysis was more right than Dewey’s in the
1920s and 1930s, one could argue that his views should be even more per-
suasive in our contemporary modern culture saturated, as it is, by mass me-
dia at a level Lipmann could only glimpse in part toward the end of his career.

Richard Posner’s Type 2 Theory of Democracy
More recently, federal appellate court judge and public intellectual Rich-
ard Posner has provided a complex pragmatic critique of the strong form of
deliberative democracy advocated by Dewey.46 Interestingly, Posner never
mentions Lipmann, but his views can be read as a theoretical extension of
Lipmann’s earlier position applied to our even more complex postindustrial
society. Posner makes a case for what he calls Type 2 democracy, as contrasted
with the stronger Type 1 form of strong deliberative democracy supported,
albeit in different ways, by Jefferson, Madison, Dewey, and most contem-
porary progressive political theorists.47 Posner draws on the work of Dewey,
although he rejects his epistemological conception of democracy and edu-
cation for democracy as naïve. His conception of Type 2 democracy is largely
shaped by his own “practical” conception of pragmatism fused with the theo-
ries of conservative (Posner tends to view this work as falling within the scope
of classical liberalism) scholars like Hayek and Schumpeter and liberal John
Stewart Mill to develop an argument that rejects as unsophisticated any at-
tempt, including educational reforms, to construct a strong form of delib-
erative democracy.
According to Posner, deliberative democracy is a quixotic and even coun-
terproductive approach to governing modern societies. In an innovative ap-
plication of market economic theory, Posner argues that our democratic
political system functions much like a free market economy. Like Hayek,
Lipmann, and Schumpeter, he considers modern society far too complex for
the mass of humanity to understand. In fact, even elite technocratic groups
never have access to the knowledge necessary for a full understanding of
social issues. However, the market structure (think in terms of John Stewart
Mill’s “marketplace of ideas” wherein different views compete for attention
and scrutiny) provides a structure for sorting and filtering political and tech-
nical information in a way that has the best potential to enable Democratic
politicians to try to sell their candidacy to voters much as entrepreneurs do
in terms of goods or services.
Posner does consider the right to vote to be a critically important element
of democracy. Although the average person is unlikely to have the compe-
tence to make complex policy decisions, he or she is qualified to determine,

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 189

over time, if elected officials are acting in the public interest. In this respect,
he seems to have more faith than Lipmann in the competence of the masses
to make good choices regarding their political representatives. However, even
if a case could be made that the public often selects candidates unwisely,
voting is a necessary condition for the success of Posner’s model of democ-
racy. If we follow the logic of Posner’s argument, progressive approaches to
education for social transformation would be a bad idea, especially if they
focused on developing an illusionary conception of participatory democracy
and dysfunctional restrictions on a market economy. Posner believes that
Type 2 democracy is already functioning reasonably well in the United States.
Thus, schools should help students move away from the progressive’s naïve
conception of Type 1 participatory democracy and secure a better under-
standing of how our current Type 2 democracy works, how it might be
improved, and why it is the preferred political system.

Leming’s Rejection of Social Studies as Problems-Based
Citizenship Education
In a parallel but related development, social studies educator James
Leming has made a case for removing what he sees as an emphasis on criti-
cal thinking, social problems, and citizenship education as core goals for social
studies education.48 Leming’s most recent work has been supported by the
conservative Fordham Foundation, which has been a leading voice in the
current conservative attack on public education.49
Leming traces the first significant recommendation to focus on citizen-
ship and social problems to the 1916 Report on the Social Studies Com-
mittee, part of the NEA Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary
Education.50 This approach also formed the basis of the more radical social
reconstructionist program for countersocialization to promote social trans-
formation in the 1920s and 1930s. But this general agreement on the need,
or even the propriety, of countersocialization as a function of the social stud-
ies is not shared by the profession as a whole, according to Leming. He cites
Engle and Ochoa as a good example of progressive social educators espous-
ing an unhelpful “fringe position” on the definition of citizenship as a goal
for the social studies.51
Leming first speculated, and then sought to demonstrate empirically, the
hypothesis that the progressive critical position of college and university pro-
fessors of social studies represents a distinctive academically oriented cultural
ideology that is substantially at odds with the ideology and culture that per-
vades the K-12 social studies classrooms, one that includes the vast major-
ity of social studies educators. Leming also argues that the views of K-12
teachers are far more representative of the general population’s views regard-
ing education. He suggests that social studies academics should confine them-
selves to working within the profession’s cultural mainstream. His most

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190 Defending Public Schools

serious argument, however, challenges the basic validity of using social studies
to promote countersocialization (and, by inference, social transformation)
in a democratic society in which the public does not and would not endorse
such a function for the public schools.52
Leming argues that defining “citizenship” as the rationale for social studies
suffers from two serious problems.53 First, that any usably clear definition
of citizenship would require substantive agreement on civic values and, per-
haps, even a shared vision of the ideal society, which appears unlikely and
perhaps undesirable. Furthermore, promoting a preferred view of social
welfare is not something that could be or should be established for the so-
ciety by social studies teachers. Second, he suggests that social studies in-
struction has proved to be ineffective in promoting even such limited aspects
of citizenship as voting behavior. Leming has reviewed three major controlled
studies of programs designed to promote students’ critical thinking, thought-
fulness, and analysis of social problems as competencies central to citizen-
ship education. He claims that none of the research supports a significant
effect on student behavior. In fact, the emphasis on these goals is often coun-
terproductive, resulting in higher levels of student frustration, hostility, and,
consequently, wasting time better spent on more important goals.
Leming also cites the work of King and Kitchener to support his conten-
tion that reflective judgments regarding social issues (in effect, developing
policy proposals) are beyond the cognitive capacity of the vast majority of
public school students.54 Contrary to what progressive social studies educa-
tors seem to assume, the level of cognitive development necessary to engage
effectively in the reflective analysis of social problems is generally not achieved
until age twenty-four. If Leming is right, most undergraduate college stu-
dents also lack the necessary competence for high level reflective thought.
For Leming, forcing middle and high school students to engage in high level
reflective analysis of social problems is (a) an approach to social studies that
is fundamentally undemocratic (given what the vast majority of people be-
lieve should be the goals of social studies), (b) an ineffective teaching method
(given research results), (c) likely to cause student frustration, failure, and
hostility, and (d) a waste of time better spent on more important social studies
goals.
What should be the focus of social studies education? Leming argues that
“[t]he development of an accurate knowledge of our American history, our
traditions and the social world, should be the superordinate [sic] goal of social
studies instruction. Our job as professionals should be to develop interest-
ing, engaging, and effective means of achieving this goal.”55 Leming does
not rule out teaching for thoughtfulness but argues that we need to recon-
sider what we mean by critical thinking and design a more modest focus for
students to engage in thinking activities that does not ask students to go
“beyond their abilities, yet [still] contribute to their future capacity for re-
flective thought.”56 Such an approach might include the study of policy

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 191

debates as a component of American history and government courses, as well
as developing a “rich and accurate store of information about our nation’s
history and institutions.” Leming, like Hirsch, sees the acquisition of basic
core knowledge (“cultural literacy”) as fundamental to any successful edu-
cation program.
In any event, Leming has spelled out a rationale that does rule out the
kinds of intellectual activity that progressive educators and others regard as
absolutely essential for developing the ability of students to think critically.
Leming’s more limited approach to social studies is in direct opposition to
any educational program for social transformation, as well as the more mod-
erate progressive approaches to citizenship education described earlier. In his
view, most progressive approaches to education are actually thinly disguised
liberal or Left political agendas.
Viewed within the context of SBER and the neoconservative revival re-
flected in various education reports, think tank policy publications, and aca-
demic scholarship critical of public schooling coupled with the work of other
“renegade” or “contrarian” social studies educators, Leming’s work has made
a significant in-house contribution to the conservative discourse on educa-
tional reform. In addition, Posner’s recent critique of deliberative democ-
racy (including citizenship education programs based on Type 1 democracy)
has added a powerful theoretical argument for rejecting progressive politi-
cal and educational ideas. Taken as a whole, the neoconservative political and
educational reform agenda has constructed a persuasive theoretical basis and
effective discourse for rejecting not only education for social transformation
but also the virtual core of the progressive education tradition. We might
well be witnessing a sea change in the intellectual history of American edu-
cation.
The consequences of this conservative agenda have had far-reaching ef-
fects. First, an influential movement to deregulate and privatize public edu-
cation has gained legitimacy.57 While conservatives have always sought to
influence the nature of public education, many are now arguing that public
schooling is an institution whose time has passed. The call for charter schools,
home schooling, and vouchers are all elements of this move toward
privatization. Second, the focus on a market economy as both the corner-
stone of democracy and the best way to create educational excellence poses
a direct challenge to the progressive conception of the role of schooling in
a democratic society. The SBER focus on students as workers and consum-
ers as opposed to citizens has already led to a reduction or elimination of
citizenship education and the critical analysis of social issues, ideas central
to the social studies curriculum tradition.58
The implications for social studies teacher education are clear. If one is
obligated to start with the assumption that a free market economy is the
precondition for individual liberty and democracy, all attempts to analyze
alternative economic and political systems are reduced to an examination of

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192 Defending Public Schools

why the alternative systems are inferior. Educational reform discourse is in
danger of being reduced to a dogmatic monologue. Given the current po-
litical context of education reform, what response might we make to the
conservative critique?

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
First, as challenging as I think the conservative critique of Type 1 democ-
racy is, I would still reject key elements of Leming’s and Posner’s arguments.
In the case of Leming, he has made a compelling case for his approach to
social education. Evans’s critique of Leming’s position as an exaggerated and
distorted view of social studies education is generally persuasive.59 In addi-
tion, although not in direct response to Leming, Parker’s case for a strong
form of citizenship education as the cornerstone of social studies draws on
a broad range of scholarship that undermines the more extreme elements
of Leming’s argument.60
In addition, Posner agrees with the argument of progressives like Parker
who argue—correctly I think—that democracy has not been and is not now
the natural human condition. It is rather easy to document how infrequently
democratic societies (even loosely defined) have existed throughout history.
Moreover, strong forms of deliberative democracy (Posner’s Type 1) have
been even rarer and are likely to be confined to local rather than national
contexts. To acknowledge this fact seems, to me, a compelling reason to
include the teaching of democratic citizenship in our K-12 schools. On this
point Posner and various progressive proponents of citizenship education
would agree. Democracy does not just happen; it must be cultivated and
learned. Posner, of course, would have schools teach students about the in-
evitability and desirability of Type 2 as opposed to Type 1 democracy. I am
not so sure about Leming, who would be more likely to deal with the issue
indirectly via teaching “core” cultural knowledge as a scaffold for future
participation in the democratic process.
I side with Parker on this point. Although I can acknowledge the power
of the Leming, Lipmann, Posner (and so on) critique of progressive ap-
proaches to citizenship education, I am left asking what alternative would
make sense. Let us assume, for the purpose of argument, that these conser-
vative critics are largely correct (i.e., by and large, elites make the crucial
complex policy decisions in democracies and the masses have the difficult,
if not impossible, task of engaging in the sort of behaviors associated with
Type 1 democracy). We must ask how it is that the members of the elite were
able to rise to that position. Presumably—but only presumably— access to
elite group membership is never reduced merely to a birthright. Our his-
tory is filled with numerous examples of former poor and working-class in-
dividuals who rose to positions of enormous influence. True, the children
of elite families have an advantage, but that has never precluded a signifi-

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 193

cant number of individuals from non-elite backgrounds from becoming
members of elite political, economic, social, and policy groups. Unless we
assume we can predict with a high level of certainty who among the masses
has such potential, on what basis would we withhold a focus on strong forms
of citizenship education from the education of all children?
Second, for both pragmatic and political reasons, it would be a mistake
to dismiss the conservative education critique of progressive education. The
current level of political support for the conservative education agenda rep-
resents a clear, if not overwhelming, majority. It is simply not possible for
K-12 teachers and teacher educators to ignore the basic elements of SBER,
whatever our misgivings. Indeed, schools of education that openly resist
SBER could find themselves on the endangered species list. It would also
be a mistake to dismiss the conservative critiques of progressive education.
While the conservative education reform discourse has often been mean spir-
ited, exaggerated, unfair, narrow, disingenuous, and simply wrong, much of
the conservative scholarship has raised real issues that progressives should
heed if they want to be taken seriously.61
I have been to far too many meetings at which progressive colleagues at-
tack the conservative agenda and bemoan the current state of affairs. These
laments are quickly followed by the secular equivalent of amen. We
progressives are too often preaching to the choir, not listening to external
criticism, and in danger of existing in an intellectual echo chamber. Ironi-
cally, progressives’ pleas on behalf of critical thinking frequently degenerate
into a form of closed inquiry. Too many of us are no better than our con-
servative critics when it comes to keeping an open mind—something intrinsic
to truly critical thought.
Third, in the present political context—and this needs to be said—pro-
gressive proposals to use K-12 education for the purpose of radical cultural
transformation are completely unrealistic. What is worse, they could easily
be counterproductive in terms of undermining what credibility progressives
have left. For all practical purposes, conservatives have won, at least tempo-
rarily, the current culture war. What has happened since Reagan’s election
in 1980 is equivalent to the ascendancy of Roosevelt’s welfare state model
from 1932 until well into the 1970s. Like all political victories, this one is
no doubt a temporary phenomenon, but it does not, at this time, show any
signs of receding. Indeed, the SBER movement is thoroughly bipartisan.62
All major political candidates in both parties endorse SBER in principle and
tend to quarrel only over costs and implementation issues. Major teacher
associations have endorsed the basic elements of the SBER movement. Most
of the critical reaction by teachers and teacher educators who do resist is
typically dismissed as special pleading. Certainly, this is both an unfair and
unhealthy political climate, and I am not arguing that we abandon thoughtful
forms of resistance. In fact, it is our professional obligation to resist those
ideas and systems we find antithetical to education for human betterment.

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194 Defending Public Schools

However, we should be both realistic and relevant in our critiques or few
will have much interest in our ideas. We must constantly bear in mind that
we are teaching “other people’s children.” Leming is not entirely wrong
when he calls our attention to a tendency for progressive educators to act
as if they know what is best for the masses, while simultaneously preaching
about participatory democracy. This sort of behavior can quickly become just
another form of elitism. For example, the idea that any significant number
of K-12 teachers, much less the public at large, would support the sort of
Marxist views and education proposals endorsed by critical teacher educa-
tors strikes me as both surreal in political terms and elitist in its rhetorical
appeal to superior knowledge located in “sacred” texts. If only we all read
the right books, we would understand clearly what must be done.
Fourth, beyond crassly pragmatic political constraints and antidemocratic
elitism, there is a deeper intellectual problem at the heart of radical progres-
sive arguments for social transformation. The problem was well described
by Dewey over seventy years ago. Earlier, I described Dewey’s reasons for
rejecting the reconstructionist arguments for social transformation. I believe
that Dewey’s position, combined with newer scholarship in pragmatism, criti-
cal theory, and more recent philosophical traditions (e.g., philosophical
hermeneutics and poststructuralist theory), provides an alternative to the
reductionist arguments for countersocialization that have been directly linked
to arguments for social transformation.63
When progressive educators argue that social studies should include some
kind of balance between socialization and an opposing countersocialization,
they typically are construing “socialization” as the inculcation of the domi-
nant social order’s established norms—that is, as a debilitating training for
conformity rather than a habilitating, enabling, and empowering formation
of competence to act effectively within a particular society. While I support
many of the educational practices recommended by the advocates of counter-
socialization, it is not necessary to invoke countersocialization as the ratio-
nale for these practices. It makes more sense—both intellectually and
pragmatically—to justify the practices required as central to the “socializa-
tion” students need for competence as effective citizens vis-à-vis democratic
culture and society.
In a linguistic context, James Gee notes how development as a member
of a language community or a society is fulfilled only at a stage where one
is competent to improvise and to participate in fundamental transforma-
tions.64 For example, we do not think that the socialization of young scien-
tists should be limited to training in the replication of past findings or
conventional procedures. Fresh thinking and the challenging of established
paradigms are not regarded as antiscientific, and thus science students re-
quire some kind of “countersocialization” that is opposed to “traditional”
socialization as members of particular disciplines. No more should we de-

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 195

scribe as “countersocializing” those educational experiences in which students
acquire the abilities to challenge social norms or policies, for these abilities
are not antisocial but are essential aspects of the educated democratic mind.
Fifth, we need to reconsider how we teach values within a progressive
curriculum framework. Instead of treating democratic values as positive, a
priori, given the attributes of individuals or of societies, to be “analyzed”
and “clarified,” or to be directly taught, observed, applied, and inculcated,
“values” would and should be open to reflective and critical consideration
as judgments that have been formed over time as to the real, demonstrable
values of the principles or practices in question—or the value that commit-
ment to those principles or practices is believed to have in relation to real
personal and social human interests. Even such “core” values as freedom,
justice, and equality should be open to questioning. Reaffirmation requires
a faith in the value of reexamining our principles—a confidence that ques-
tioning would lead to a renewed demonstration of the value of those prin-
ciples.65
Indeed, the experience of recognizing the critical pragmatic importance
of these values when they are challenged on the basis of some genuine doubt
is exactly the kind of educational experience in which these values really can
be learned as part of the ongoing development of students’ practical com-
petence for citizenship. My fear is that the present dominant approach, one
strongly reinforced by most conservative and a good number of progressive
educators as well, too often teaches only “pious” ways of talking about val-
ues that are not truly believed—if they are even understood. Indeed, if core
values are held but are immune from critical examination, this might even
teach students that such values are being preached dogmatically out of an
implicit anxiety that they could not withstand critical scrutiny.
When critical pedagogy advocates insist, either explicitly or through their
rhetoric, that a preexisting value commitment to an insurgent social agenda
must come first, before specifically pedagogical proposals can be considered,
this unfortunately suggests that their proposals are of interest or value only
to those who share such specific substantive value commitments in advance.
This approach to education reform is counterproductive, because the cur-
riculum and teaching practices proposed by such progressive reformers are
more likely to succeed to the extent they are open to the critical reexamina-
tion of core values. Such an open reflective approach needs to be embraced
by a broader community as the kind of pedagogy that would promote for-
mation of the competencies for full participation in a democratic society.
Sixth, we need to move beyond the dominant conception of critical think-
ing that understands drawing distinctions between “facts” and “values” as a
skill basic to critical thought. This is just one aspect of what happens in at-
tempts to replace real critical thinking with something that has been reduced
to merely technical procedures. Since real critical thinking cannot be reduced

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196 Defending Public Schools

to technical analysis, artificial technical procedures are invented tailor-made
for teaching, but without any use or relevance outside the phony teaching
situation.
Typically, such artificially concocted “thinking skills” are then substituted
for real practical abilities. One out of many possible examples is the “skill”
of “identifying bias,” whereby “bias” is operationally defined as character-
izing statements or positions expressed (for example) in emotionally charged
language—since it is easy to teach techniques for identifying emotionally
charged language that make this an attractive definition of “bias” if, that is,
the only relevant criterion is conduciveness to being taught as a technique
requiring no practical judgment. The problem is that outside of such bogus
teaching situations, bias refers to something different, something real and
important, something that students do need to be able to recognize and deal
with. Human understanding cannot emerge from a blank slate. Having bi-
ases is something that is an essential component of our human capacity to
make sense of each other and the world. Human thinking is impossible with-
out biases or prejudices.
Certainly we should cultivate an awareness of our biases to limit their
potentially negative effects (i.e., the potential to limit our capacity to think
critically). However, we must also help students to understand the neces-
sary role biases play in enabling us to communicate with others. Our con-
sciousness of how our predispositions, preferences, and prejudices can play
a positive role in communication, interpretation, and understanding is a criti-
cal component of a complete education. The ability to discern how biases
both facilitate and limit human understanding requires far more than the kind
of technical analysis and criteria called for by either conservative critics or
certain gurus of “critical thinking skills.” Democratic education should aim
for nothing less than the understanding and employment essential to the real
mental competence for interpersonal communication and making practical
social and political judgments required in a democratic culture. This argu-
ment is an extension of the positive analysis of ideology presented earlier.
Seventh, in the present SBER context, knowledge of the scholarly disci-
plines is promoted as one of the fundamental elements of effective teach-
ing. I would agree with a renewed emphasis on disciplinary knowledge, but
not in the way such knowledge is generally described by conservative crit-
ics. Dewey was, contrary to his critics, a strong supporter of disciplinary
knowledge as a core curriculum component. Such knowledge does repre-
sent significant human achievements in our attempt to better understand the
social and physical world. If the issue of defining social education centers on
the question of what students need for social competence, then the neces-
sary roles of social science disciplines as resources become apparent, although
not as the ends of social education in itself.
What C. Wright Mills described as “the sociological imagination” is a good
example of one form of social competence that is essential for developing

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Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation 197

competent democratic citizens.66 Mills was troubled by the widespread lack
of ability for people to understand the private troubles, circumstances, and
affairs of individuals in terms of larger social and historical forces and pro-
cesses that decisively determine the constraints and opportunities that im-
pinge on them—or, conversely, to understand larger scale phenomena in
terms of how they result from, and in turn affect, the practices of daily life—
or, finally, even to conceive of how to act in ways that might effectively im-
prove our situation and our prospects, taking both levels of our historical
and quotidian lives into account. Analogues to Mills’s approach could be
applied to history and other social science disciplines as well.
The key point is to understand these disciplinary capabilities as aspects of
practical competence participation in a democratic society, not as ends in
themselves. When people think of their situations only in terms of their own
immediate familiar circumstances, they might be faulted for being selfish or
for lacking the “right” democratic values. Instead, we should be looking at
the consciousness of social causes, consequences, and relationships as an at-
tribute of social competence and the democratic mind that requires a social
education informed by the social science disciplines.
Eighth, the position recommended here is directly influenced by Dewey’s
commitment to, and faith in, what he referred to as “the method of intelli-
gence.” Dewey, unlike the reconstructionists and many contemporary pro-
gressive educators, believed that it was possible to cultivate the formation
of the democratic mind by attending to requirements of competence for
social action without the need to direct instruction toward more specific
social outcomes or a theory of social welfare. This approach to education
also enables us to see the development of citizenship as something that can
be meaningfully and fruitfully pursued in schools without the need to first
come to a consensus on our substantive conceptions of democracy.
Much like Dewey, I believe that the only valid path to education for social
transformation lies in enabling students themselves to develop the compe-
tencies for active participation in a democratic culture. Dewey was convinced
that such efforts would surely result in a more democratic and egalitarian
society. The best society is the one in which human potential has the op-
portunity to develop and flourish. Competent citizens, not progressive
schoolteachers alone, are in the best position to determine the shape of the
democratic society to come.

Ch13_173-198.pmd 197 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Ch13_173-198.pmd 198 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes

GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
1. Portions of this section draw upon E. Wayne Ross, “Remaking the Social Studies
Curriculum,” in The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities,
rev. ed., ed. E. Wayne Ross (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
2. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 87
3. Robert W. McChesney, introduction to Profit over People: Neoliberalism and
Global Order, by Noam Chomsky (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1988).
4. Madison quoted in Chomsky, Profits over People, p. 47.
5. For an explication of these issues see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pan-
theon, 1988).
6. Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997).
7. A. A. Lispcom and A. Ellery, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 16
(Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903), p. 96.
8. Dewey quoted in Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare (Vancouver: New Star Books,
1997).

INTRODUCTION
1. Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne Ross, Image and Education: Teaching in the
Face of the New Disciplinarity (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).

Notes_199-222.pmd 199 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

200 Notes

CHAPTER 1
1 .Maxine Greene, Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lec-
tures on Aesthetic Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001).
2 .Elliot W. Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind (London: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2002).
3 .Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind, p. 1.
4 .Rita L. Irwin, Wendy Stephenson, Helen Robertson, and J. Karen Reynolds,
“Passionate Creativity, Compassionate Community,” Canadian Review of Art Edu-
cation, 28, no. 2 (2001), pp. 15–34.
5 .Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind.
6 .Frances Rauscher and Gordon Shaw, “Key Components of the Mozart Effect,”
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 86 (1998), pp. 835–41.
7 .Rena Upitis and Katharine Smithrim, Learning through the Arts National As-
sessment 1999–2002: Final Report to The Royal Conservatory of Music (Kingston, Ont.:
Faculty of Education, Queen’s University, 2003), pp. 1–54.
8 .Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind, pp. 42–45.
9 .Greene, Variations on a Blue Guitar, p. 82.
10 .John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton Balch, 1934).
11 .Upitis and Smithrim, Learning through the Arts, p. 2.
12 .Gail Burnaford, Arnold Aprill, Cynthia Weiss, and the Chicago Arts Partners
in Education, eds., Renaissance in the Classroom: Arts Integration and Meaningful
Learning (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001), p. 10.
13 .Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind, p. 3.
14 .Lynne B. Silverstein, “Artist Residencies: Evolving Educational Experiences,”
in Acts of Achievement: The Role of the Performing Arts Centers in Education, ed.
Barbara Rich, Jane L. Polin, and Stephen J. Marcus (New York: Dana Press, 2003).
15 .Rita L. Irwin, Sylvia Wilson Kind, Kit Grauer, and Alex de Cosson, “Integra-
tion as Embodied Curriculum” (under review).
16 .Brent Hocking, Johnna Haskell, and Warren Linds, eds., Unfolding Bodymind:
Exploring Possibility through Education (Brandon, VT: Foundation for Educational
Renewal, 2001).
17 .John P. Miller, The Holistic Curriculum (Toronto, Ont.: OISE Press, 1988).
18 .Burnaford, Aprill, and Weiss, Renaissance in the Classroom.
19 .Ramon Gallegos Nava, Holistic Education: Pedagogy of Universal Love, trans.
Madeline Newman Rios and Gregory S. Miller. (Brandon, VT: Foundation for Edu-
cational Renewal, 2001).
20 .Upitis and Smithrim, Learning through the Arts, p. 6, who are referring to
James S. Catterall, Richard Chapleau, and John Iwanaga, Involvement in the Arts
and Human Development: General Involvement and Intensive Involvement in Music
and Theatre Arts, 1999 (The Imagination Project, Graduate School of Education
and Information Studies, University of California at Los Angeles: 11 February 2004),
21 .Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind, p. 49.
22 .Rita L. Irwin, “Towards an Aesthetic of Unfolding In/Sights through Cur-
riculum,” Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 1, no. 2
(2003), pp. 63–78.

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Notes 201

CHAPTER 2
1 .Robert D. Barr, James L. Barth, and Samuel S. Shermis, Defining the Social
Studies (Washington, DC: National Council for the Social Studies, 1977), p. 1.
2 .Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1973).
3 .Herbert M. Kliebard, “The Rise of Scientific Curriculum Making and Its Af-
termath,” Curriculum Theory Network 5, no. 1 (1975), p. 28.
4 .Barr, Barth, and Shermis, Defining the Social Studies, p. 19.
5 .Ibid., p. 20.
6 .Edgar. B. Wesley and Stanley Wronski, Teaching Social Studies in High School
(Boston: D.C. Heath, 1958), p. 3.
7 .William B. Stanley and Jack L. Nelson, “The Foundations of Social Educa-
tion in Historical Context,” in Inside/Out: Contemporary Critical Perspectives in Edu-
cation ed. R. M. Martusewicz and W. M. Reynolds (St. Martins Press, 1994), pp.
266–84.
8 .Stanley and Nelson, “The Foundations of Social Education in Historical Con-
text,” p. 276.
9 .Larry Cuban, “The History of Teaching Social Studies,” in Handbook of Re-
search on Social Studies Teaching and Learning, ed. James P. Shaver (New York:
MacMillan, 1991), pp. 197–209.
10 .Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, A Nation Prepared: Teachers
for the 20th Century (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1986), p. 25.
11 .Jane Bernard-Powers, “Gender in the Social Studies Curriculum,” in The So-
cial Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems and Possibilities, ed. E. Wayne Ross (State
University of New York Press, 2000).
12 .Nel Noddings, “Social Studies and Feminism,” in The Social Studies Curricu-
lum: Purposes, Problems and Possibilities, ed. E. Wayne Ross (State University of New
York Press, 2000), p. 174.
13 .Diane Ravitch, “A Brief History of the Social Studies,” in Where Did Social
Studies Go Wrong?, ed. James Leming, L. Ellington, and K. Porter (Washington, DC:
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2003).
14 .B. Frazee and S. Ayers, “Garbage In: Garbage Out: Expanding Environments,
Constructivism, and Content Knowledge in Social Studies,” in Where Did Social
Studies Go Wrong?, ed. J. Leming, L. Ellington, and K. Porter (Washington, DC:
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2003).
15 .James Leming, “Ignorant Activists: Social Change, ‘Higher Order Thinking,’
and the Failure of Social Studies,” in Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?, ed. J.
Leming, L. Ellington, and K. Porter (Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foun-
dation, 2003), p. 135.
16 .Diane Ravitch, “A Brief History of the Social Studies,” p. 5.
17 .H. G. Hullfish and P. Smith, Reflective Thinking: The Method of Education
(New York: Dodd Mead, 1961); Robert Stake and J. Easley, Case Studies in Science
Education: Report to the National Science Foundation (University of Illinois at Ur-
bana-Champaign: Center for Instructional Research and Curriculum Evaluation and
Committee on Culture and Cognition, 1978), no. 036 000 0037 and no. 0038 000
00376-3 (Washington, DC: USGPO); K. Wiley, The Status of Pre-College Science,

Notes_199-222.pmd 201 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

202 Notes

Mathematics, and Social Studies Education 1955–1975. Report to the National Sci-
ence Foundation, Document no. 038 000 00363-1 (Washington, DC: Social Sci-
ence Education Consortium/USGPO, 1978); James S. Shaver, O. L. Davis, and S.
Helburn, “The Status of Social Studies Education: Impressions from Three NSF
Studies,” Social Education 43, no. 2 (1979), pp. 150–3; and E. Wayne Ross, “The
Struggle for the Social Studies Curriculum,” in The Social Studies Curriculum: Pur-
poses, Problems, and Possibilities, ed. E. Wayne Ross (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2000).
18 .Richard J. Paxton, “Don’t Know Much About History—Never Did,” Phi
Delta Kappan 85, no. 4 (2003). p. 270.
19 .Ibid., p. 273.
20 .John I. Goodlad, A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1984).
21 .Ibid., p. 212.
22 .James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American His-
tory Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
23 .D. Helfand, “Mr. Harts’s Teachable Moment,” Los Angeles Times, 19 Novem-
ber 2002.
24 .Perry M. Marker, “Thinking Out of the Box: Rethinking and Reinventing a
Moribund Social Studies Curriculum,” Theory and Research in Social Education 50
(2001).
25 .C. A. Bowers, Mindful Conservatism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2003).
26 .Perry M. Marker, “High-Stakes Testing in Teacher Education: The Califor-
nia Teacher Performance Assessment,” Workplace (July 2003), http://
www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/issue5p2/marker.html.

CHAPTER 3
1 .Nila Banton Smith, American Reading Instruction (Newark, DE: International
Reading Association, 1965).
2 .Luther C. Gilbert, “Effect on Silent Reading of Attempting to Follow Oral
Reading,” Elementary School Journal 40 (1940), pp. 614–21.
3 .Harry Singer, “Research that Should Have Made a Difference,” Elementary
English 47 (1970), pp. 27–34.
4 .Dolores Durkin, Teaching Them to Read, 4th ed. (first published 1970), (Bos-
ton: Allyn and Bacon, 1983), p. 43.
5 .Mabel V. Morphett and Carleton Washburne, “When Should Children Be-
gin to Read?” Elementary School Journal 31(1931), pp. 496–503.
6 .Rudolph Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read (New York: Harper Row, 1955).
7 .Guy L. Bond and Robert Dykstra, “The Cooperative Research Program in
First-Grade Reading,” Reading Research Quarterly 32, no. 6 (1967), pp. 348–427.
8 .National Center for Educational Statistics, http://nces.gov/
nationsreportcard/reading/trendsnational.asp.
9 .Jerome C. Harste, Virginia A.Woodward, and Carolyn L. Burke, Language
Stories and Literacy Lessons (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1984).
10 .Elizabeth Sulzby, “Children’s Emergent Reading of Favorite Storybooks: A
Developmental Study,” Reading Research Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1985), pp. 458–81.

Notes_199-222.pmd 202 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes 203

11 .Yetta M. Goodman, “What Is Whole Language?,” in The Whole Language
Catalog, ed. Kenneth S. Goodman, Lois B. Bird, and Yetta M. Goodman (Santa
Rosa, CA: American School Publishers, 1991), p. 4.
12 .Patricia A. Alexander, “Knowledge and Literacy: A Transgenerational Perspec-
tive,” in 47th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, ed. Timothy Shanahan
and Flora V. Rodriguez-Brown (Chicago: National Reading Conference, 1998), pp.
22–43, 29.
13 .P. David Pearson and Diane Stephens, “Learning about Literacy: A 30-year
History,” in Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, 4th ed., ed. Robert B.
Ruddell, Martha Rapp Ruddell, and Harry Singer (Newark, DE: International Read-
ing Association, 1994), pp. 22–42, 35.
14 .National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based As-
sessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and its Implications for
Reading Instruction. Two Documents: Publication no. 00-4769 and Publication no.
00-4754 (Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Devel-
opment, 2000).
15 .Martha Rapp Ruddell, “Of Stand-Up Comics, Statisticians, Storytellers, and
Small Girls Walking Backward: A New Look at the Discourses of Literacy Research,”
in 48th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, ed. Timothy Shanahan and
Flora V. Rodriguez-Brown (Chicago: National Reading Conference, 1999), pp. 1–
16.
16 .James W. Cunningham, “The National Reading Panel Report,” Reading
Research Quarterly 36, no. 3 (2001), pp. 326–35.
17 .Gregory Camilli, Sadako Vargas, and Michele Yurecko, “Teaching Children
to Read: The Fragile Link between Science and Federal Education Policy,” Educa-
tion Policy Analysis Archives 11, no. 15 (2003), http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n15/
(accessed 24 September 2003).
18 .Camilli, Vargas, and Yurecko, “Teaching Children to Read,” p. 4.
19 .Ibid.
20 .Camilli, Vargas, and Yurecko, “Teaching Children to Read,” p. 37
21 .Martha Rapp Ruddell, Teaching Content Reading and Writing (4th ed.),
(John Wiley & Sons, 2005).
22 .Bond and Dykstra, “The Cooperative Research Program in First-Grade Read-
ing,” p. 426.

CHAPTER 4
1 .On history see, among other sources, Joel H. Spring, The American School:
1642–2000 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).
2 .National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], A History of Math-
ematics Education in the United States and Canada (Washington, D.C.: NCTM,
1970).
3 .National Education Association [NEA], Report of the Committee of Fifteen on
Elementary Education (New York: American Book Co., 1895).
4 .Mathematical Association of America [MAA], The Reorganization of Math-
ematics in Secondary Education (MAA, 1923).
5 .NCTM, A History of Mathematics Education in the United States and Canada.
6 .Ibid.

Notes_199-222.pmd 203 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

204 Notes

7 .Ibid.
8 .Stephen S. Willoughby, “Perspectives on Mathematics Education,” in Learn-
ing Mathematics for a New Century: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
2000 Yearbook, ed. Maurice J. Burke and Frances R. Curcio (Reston, VA.: NCTM,
2000).
9 .Kathryn L. Braddon, Nancy J. Hall, and Dale Taylor, Math Through Children’s
Literature: Making the NCTM Standards Come Alive (Englewood, CO.: Teacher
Ideas Press, 1993), p. 1.
10 .Ibid., p. 1.
11 .National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], An Agenda for Ac-
tion: Recommendations for School Mathematics of the 1980s (Reston, VA.: NCTM,
1980).
12 .National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], Everybody Counts: A
Report to the Nation on the Future of Mathematics Education (Washington, D.C.:
National Academy Press, 1989); National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
[NCTM], Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics, (Reston,
VA.: NCTM, 1989).
13 .Braddon, Hall, and Taylor, Math Through Children’s Literature: Making the
NCTM Standards Come Alive, p. 1.
14 .National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM],
Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, (Reston, VA.: NCTM, 2000).
15 .Willoughby, “Perspectives on Mathematics Education,” in Learning Math-
ematics for a New Century: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 2000 Year-
book.
16 .Ibid.
17 .National Research Council (NRC), Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn
Mathematics (Washington, DC: National Academy Press/National Academy of Sci-
ences, 2001).
18 .Ibid., p. 36.
19 .Ibid., p. 39.
20 .Ibid., p. 44.
21 .Ibid., p. 54.
22 .Ibid., p. 57.
23 .See E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) and The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have
Them (New York: Doubleday, 1996). For opposing views see David C. Berliner and
Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s
Public Schools (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995) and Alfie Kohn, The Schools
Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Stan-
dards” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
24 .George W. Bush, No Child Left Behind (Executive Summary) (Washington,
DC: USGPO, 2001), January 2002, http://www.ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/
execsumm.html (accessed 27 February 2004). See also Kevin D. Vinson and E.
Wayne Ross, Image and Education: Teaching in the Face of the New Disciplinarity
(New York: Peter Lang, 2003).
25 .Ibid.
26 .The Facts About Math Achievement (Washington, DC: USGPO, 2004),

Notes_199-222.pmd 204 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes 205

http:www.ed.gov.print/nclb/methods/math/math.html (accessed 27 February
2004).
27 .The Facts About Math Achievement.
28 .Ibid.
29 .Bush, No Child Left Behind; The Facts About Math Achievement.
30 .Vinson and Ross, Image and Education.
31 .National Center for Education Statistics, Trends in International Mathemat-
ics and Science Study: Highlights from the Third International Mathematics and Sci-
ence Study-Repeat (TIMSS-R) (Washington, DC: USGPO, 2003), http://
www.nces.ed.gov/timss/highlights.asp (accessed 27 February 2004). See also, Beth
D. Greene, Marlena Herman, and David L. Haury, TIMSS: What Have We Learned
about Math and Science Teaching? ERIC Digest (Columbus, OH: ERIC, 2000),
Gerald W. Bracey’s chapter on international comparisons of student achievement in
the Defending Public Schools: The Nature and Limits of Standards Based Reform and
Assessment for a more extensive analyses of the TIMSS.
32 .Ibid.
33 .Ibid.
34 .Ibid.
35 .National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], Mathematics (Washington,
DC: 2003), http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/mathematics/results2003/
natscalescore.asp (and variously linked Web pages).
36 .National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], Principles and Stan-
dards for School Mathematics (Washington, DC: NCTM, 2000), pp. 2–3.
37 .Ibid., p. 2.
38 .Ibid.
39 .NRC, Adding It Up, p. 5.
40 .Ibid., pp. 116–17.
41 .Association for Supervision and Curriculum and Development, “Improving
Achievement in Math Science,” Educational Leadership [special issue] 61, no. 5
(2004).

CHAPTER 5
1 .F. James Rutherford and Andrew Ahlgren, Science for All Americans: Project
2061 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. ix.
2 .American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Benchmarks
for Scientific Literacy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 124.
3 .Ibid., p. 12.
4 .AAAS, Blueprints for Science Education Reform (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1997); AAAS, Atlas of Science Literacy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998). Note: All AAAS Project 2061 materials are available at no cost online at http:/
/www.project2061.org/tools/toolWeb.htm, and the NSES and its sister documents
can be found at http://www.nas.edu/nrc/.
5 .Thirty years later, in the mid-1990s, another group of researchers videotaped
Harvard students on the day of graduation and asked them questions like, Why do
we have seasons? or Where do the materials come from to turn a seed into a tree?

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206 Notes

The elaborate, yet ultimately wrong, explanations from these graduates is testimony
to the resistance of even the brightest learners to reconstructing experience-based
beliefs about the world, regardless of how “excellent” their education might have
been. Note: A Private Universe videos may be obtained from the Annenberg/CPB
Math and Science Project at http://www.learner.org/teacherslab/index.html.
6 .See, for example, J. R. Mokros and R. F. Tinker, “The Impact of Microcom-
puter-based Labs on Children’s Ability to Interpret Graphs,” Journal of Research in
Science Teaching 24, no. 4 (1987), pp. 363–83.
7 .J. Hawkins and R. D. Pea, “New Representations: Tools for Bridging the Cul-
tures of Everyday and Scientific Thinking,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching
24, no. 4 (1987), pp. 291–307.
8 .National Research Council, National Science Education Standards: Observe,
Interact, Change, Learn (New York: National Academy Press, 1995); AAAS, Bench-
marks for Science Literacy; AAAS, Atlas of Scientific Literacy; and AAAS, Blueprints
for Science Education Reform.
9 .For an overview, see I. R. Weiss, E. R. Banilower, R. A. Crawford, and C. M.
Overstreet, Local Systemic Change through Teacher Enhancement, Year Eight Cross-
Site Report (Triangle Park, NC: Horizon Research, 2001). Note: available online at
10 .See O. Amaral, L. Garrison, and M. L. Klentschy, “Helping English Learn-
ers Increase Achievement through Inquiry-based Science Instruction,” Bilingual
Research Journal 26, no. 2 (2002), pp. 213–39.

CHAPTER 6
1 .Gordon G. Vessels, Character and Community Development: A School Plan-
ning and Teacher Training Handbook (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), p. 16.
2 .Ibid., p. 17.
3 .Don Trent Jacobs and Jessica Jacobs-Spencer, Teaching Virtues: Building
Character Across the Curriculum (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001), p. ix.
4 .Patrick Slattery, Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era (New York:
Garland, 1995), p. 79.
5 .Larry K. Brendtro, Martin Brokenleg, and Steve Van Bockern, Reclaiming
Youth at Risk: Our Hope for the Future (Bloomington, IN: National Education Ser-
vice, 1990).
6 .J. Baird Callicot and Fernando J. Da Rocha, eds., Earth’s Insights: A Survey
of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback (New
York: SUNY Press, 1997).
7 .Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. M. Oswald (Indianapolis: Liberal Arts
Press, 1962).
8 .William J. Bennett, The Book of Virtues (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
9 .Ibid.
10 .Vessels, Character and Community Development, p. 19.
11 .Robert J. Nash, Answering the “Virtuecrats”: A Moral Conversation on Char-
acter Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), p. xi.
12 .Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development: The Philosophy of Moral
Development, vol. 2 (New York: HarperCollins, 1984).

Notes_199-222.pmd 206 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes 207

13 .Nel Noddings, Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character
Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002).
14 .Jacobs and Jacob-Spencer, Teaching Virtues; Don Trent Jacobs (Four Arrows),
Spirituality in Education: A Matter of Significance for American Indian Cultures
(Brandon, VT: Holistic Education Press, 2002).
15 .Edward A. Wynne and Kevin Ryan, Reclaiming Our Schools: Teaching Char-
acter, Academics, and Discipline, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill, 1997),
p. 68.
16 .Nash, Answering the “Virtuecrats,” p. xi.
17 .Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: The Free Press,
1938).
18 .Don Trent Jacobs, Primal Awareness: A True Story of Survival, Awakening
and Transformation with the Raramuri Shamans of Mexico (Rochester, VT: Inner
Traditions International, 1998).
19 .Thomas Lickona, Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Re-
spect and Responsibility (New York: Bantam Books, 1992).
20 .Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Soci-
ety (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 38.
21 .Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991), p. 466.
22 .C. David Lisman, The Curricular Investigation of Ethics: Theory and Practice
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), p. 5.
23 .Jacobs, Spirituality in Education, p. 16.
24 .Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Reginald Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1972).
25 .Noddings, Educating Moral People.
26 .Jamake Highwater, The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America
(New York: HarperCollins, 1982), p. 126.
27 .D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, trans. Michael Squires (New York:
Penguin, 1994; reprint, 1928).
28 .E. M. Forster, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World), pp. 441–75.
29 .Jo Ann Boydston, ed., John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953 (Carbondale,
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), p. 166.
30 .Rebecca Robbins, “John Dewey’s Philosophy and American Indians,” Jour-
nal of American Indian Education 22, no. 3 (1983).
31 .Denise Lardner Carmody and John Tully Carmody, Native American Reli-
gions (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 232.
32 .Brendtro, Brokenleg, and Van Bockern, Reclaiming Youth at Risk, p. 34.
33 .Stanley Coopersmith, The Antecedents of Self Esteem (San Francisco: Freeman,
1967).
34 .Joan G. Miller, “Culture and Moral Judgment: How Are Conflicts Between
Justice and Interpersonal Responsibilities Resolved,” Journal of Personality and So-
cial Psychology 26 (1992), pp. 541–54.
35 .R. S. Fabes, J. Fultz, N. Eisenberg, T. May-Plumlee, and F. S. Christopher,
“Effects of Rewards on Children’s Prosocial Motivation: A Socialization Study,”
Developmental Psychology 25 (1989), pp. 509–15.

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208 Notes

36 .Yvonne Germaine Dufault, “A Quest for Character: Explaining the Relation-
ship Between First Nations Teachings and Character Education” (master’s thesis,
OISE, University of Toronto, 2003), pp. 80–3.
37 .Richard D. Mosier, Making the American Mind: Social and Moral Ideas in
the McGuffy Readers (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965).
38 .Vessels, Character and Community Development, p. 25.
39 .Alfie Kohn, “How Not to Teach Values,” Phi Delta Kappan, http://
www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/hnttv.htm (accessed 12 February 2004).
40 .Jacobs and Jacobs-Spencer, Teaching Virtues, p. 161.
41 .Georgia House of Representatives, House Bill 1207 QBE, Amendment to Part
15, Article 6 of Chapter 2 of Title 20 of the Official Code of Georgia, 25 January 2000.
42 .Richard T. Cooper, “General Casts War in Religious Terms,” Los Angeles
Times, 16 October 2003.
43 .Don Trent Jacobs, The Bum’s Rush: The Selling of Environmental Backlash:
Phrases and Fallacies of Rush Limbaugh (Boise: Legendary Publishing, 1994).
44 .Highwater, The Primal Mind, p. 156.
45 .Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free
Press, 1925).
46 .Ryan and Wynne, Reclaiming Our Schools, and James Davison Hunter, The
Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil (New York:
Basic Books, 2000).
47 .James Leming, Research and Practices in “Character Education: A Historical
Perspective,” in The Construction of Children’s Character, ed. A. Molnar (The Na-
tional Society for the Study of Education: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
48 .Highwater, The Primal Mind, p. 193.
49 .Jacobs and Jacobs-Spencer, Teaching Virtues, p. 18.
50 .Brendtro, Brokenleg, and Van Bockern, Reclaiming Youth at Risk, p. 35.
51 .Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God: Awakening the Spirit in Everyday Life
(New York: Bantam Books, 1995), pp. 186, 298.
52 .Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The Way of the Ani-
mal Powers, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1993).

CHAPTER 7
1 .National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk: The
Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1983).
2 .Examples of these various forms and levels of reform ideas vary, and the lit-
erature is extensive. Examples, however, and critiques, include The No Child Left
Behind Act of 2001 [Executive Summary], January 2002, http://www.ed.gov/nclb/
overview/intro/execsumm.html (accessed 26 January 2004); Robert E. Slavin and
Nancy A. Madden, One Million Children: Success for All (New York: Corwin Press,
2000) and Success for All: Research and Reform in Elementary Education (Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001); Susan Ohanian, One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Edu-
cational Standards (Portsmouth, NH, 1999); and Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne
Ross, Image and Education: Teaching in the Face of the New Disciplinarity (New
York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003).
3 .Interested readers should consult several biographies of Maria Montessori, in-
cluding E. M. Standing, Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work (New York: New

Notes_199-222.pmd 208 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes 209

American Library, 1984) and Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori: A Biography (New
York: Putnam, 1976). In addition, several of the major organizations devoted to
Montessori and the Montessori Method offer brief biographical sketches online,
including the Association Montessori Internationale [AMI], http://www.montessori-
ami.org/ami.htm, the American Montessori Society [AMS], http://
www.amshq.org/montessori.htm, and the North American Montessori Teachers’
Association [NAMTA], http://www.montessori-namta.org/home.html. Perhaps a
reasonable—and readable—introduction to Montessorian views and methods is pre-
sented in John Chattin-McNichols, The Montessori Controversy (Clifton Park, NY:
Delmar Publishers, 1991).
4 .Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind (reprint, New York: Dell, 1984); The
Secret of Childhood (reprint, Notre Dame, IN: Fides, 1966); and The Discovery of the
Child (reprint, New York: Ballantine Books, 1986).
5 .AMS, AMS Philosophy and Practice, http://www.amshq.org/print/
montessori_philosophyPNT.htm (accessed 26 January 2004).
6 .AMI, http://www.montessori-ami.org/ami.htm (accessed 26 January 2004),.
7 .Ibid.
8 .NAMTA, http://www.montessori-namta.org/home.html (accessed 26 Janu-
ary 2004).
9 .Ibid.
10 .Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, quoted in NAMTA, The “Prepared Environ-
ment,” the Montessori Materials, and “Normalization,” http://www.montessori-
namta.org/generalinfo/terms.html (accessed 26 January 2004).
11 .Standing, Maria Montessori, quoted in NAMTA, The “Prepared Environment,”
the Montessori Materials, and “Normalization,” http://www.montessori-namta.org/
generalinfo/terms.html (accessed 26 January 2004).
12 .AMI, http://www.montessori-ami.org/ami.htm (accessed 26 January 2004).
13 .Ibid.; for an overview of the various levels of Montessorian education, see also
14 .Ibid.; see also http://www.amshq.org/montessori_philosophy.htm.
15 .NAMTA, What is NAMTA, 14 January 2004, http://www.montessori-
namta.org/generalinfo/devcont.html (accessed 26 January 2004).
16 .The conservative educational criticism literature is extensive, but classic ex-
amples include (among others): Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide
to the Classical Education You Never Had (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); John
E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets and America’s Schools (Washington,
DC: The Brookings Institution, 1990); E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What
Every American Needs to Know (reprint, New York: Vintage, 1988) and The Schools
We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (reprint, New York: Anchor, 1999); and
Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2000).
17 .Here, too, the relevant literature is immense, but for classic examples see
(among others) Michael W. Apple, Official Knowledge; Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our
Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards”
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); and The Case Against Standardized Testing:
Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000);
Ohanian, One Size Fits Few; and Vinson and Ross, Image and Education, especially
chapter three.

Notes_199-222.pmd 209 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

210 Notes

18 .Vinson and Ross, Image and Education; see also David C. Berliner and Bruce
J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public
Schools (New York: Perseus, 1995).
19 .See NAMTA, Montessori: Creating a Paradigm Shift, http://www.montessori-
namta.org/generalinfo/paradigm.html (accessed on 30 January 2004).
20 .See, for example, Vinson and Ross, Image and Education; Apple, Official
Knowledge.
21 .See NAMTA, Montessori: Creating a Paradigm Shift, http://www.montessori-
namta.org/generalinfo/paradigm.html (accessed on 30 January 2004).

CHAPTER 8
1 .All these issues are examined in depth in the companion to this volume: De-
fending Public Schools: The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and As-
sessment, ed. Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross.
2 .See, for example, Bracey’s chapter “International Assessment Studies: Find-
ings, Critiques, and Implications” in Defending Public Schools: The Nature and Limits
of Standards Based Reform and Assessment.
3 .David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud,
and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1995).
4 .Susan Ohanian, One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards (Ports-
mouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999).
5 .See, for example, Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross, “The Hegemony of
Accountability in Schools and Universities,” Workplace: A Journal of Academic La-
bor 5, no. 1 (October 2002), http://www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/
issue5p1/mathison.html.
6 .For sure, comparative test scores will enable us to verify disparities in achieve-
ment between and among different schools, districts, and states; these same scores
will enable higher authorities to point a stiff finger at lower authorities for allowing
“unequal teaching,” but the solution for educational inequalities remain the politi-
cal choice of those who control educational funding. So far, little has changed. In
fact, an Appellate Court judge in New York State recently ruled that no change was
necessary, as the provision of an eighth-grade education is sufficient governmental
responsibility.
7 .See the winter 2003 issue of Teacher Education Quarterly for a thorough ex-
amination and critique of the state regulation of teacher education in California and
particularly articles by Christine Sleeter (“Reform and Control: An Analysis of SB
2042”) and Ann Berlak (“Who’s In Charge Here? Teacher Education and 2042”),
8 .For an examination of various ways in which “militarization” and
“corporatization” function in schools, see Kenneth J. Saltman and David A. Gabbard,
eds., Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools
(New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).
9 .Rich Gibson, The Fascist Origins of the SAT Test (San Diego: San Diego State
University, 2001), http:// www.rougeform.org; See also Sandra Mathison’s chap-
ter “A Short History of Educational Assessment & Standards Based Educational Re-
form,” in Defending Public Schools: The Nature and Limits of Standards Based Re-
form and Assessment.

Notes_199-222.pmd 210 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes 211

10 .Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection, Eugenics, American Racism, and German
Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
11 .Barry Mehler, “Eliminating the Inferior: American and Nazi Sterilization Pro-
grams,” Science for the People (November/December 1987), pp. 14–18.
12 .Gibson, The Fascist Origins of the SAT Test.
13 .Robert J. Sternberg, “Ability and Expertise: It’s Time to Replace the Current
Model of Intelligence,” American Educator (spring 1999), pp. 10–12, 50–51.
14. Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (New York: Routledge, Chapman
and Hall, 1990).
15 .D. David Noble, “The Corporate Roots of Science,” in Science and Libera-
tion, ed. Pat Brennan, Steve Cavrak, and Rita Arditti (Montreal: Black Rose Books,
1980), pp. 64–65.
16 .Noble, “The Corporate Roots of Science,” p. 65.
17 .Ibid., p. 71.
18 .Mann quoted in Noble, “The Corporate Roots of Science,” p. 73.
19 .Noble, “The Corporate Roots of Science,” p. 73.
20 .Ibid., p. 74.
21 .William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World
War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995).
22 .E. Wayne Ross, “Redrawing the Lines: The Case Against Traditional Social
Studies Instruction,” in Democratic Social Education: Social Studies for Social Change,
ed. David W. Hursh and E. Wayne Ross (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000).
23 .Sydney Lens, The Military-Industrial Complex (Philadelphia, PA: Pilgrim Press
& Kansas City, MI: The National Catholic Reporter, 1970).
24 .Ibid., p. 23.
25 .Ibid. p. 22.
26 .Ibid., pp. 22–23.
27 .James P. Shaver, O. L. Davis, Jr., and Suzanne W. Helburn, “The Status of
Social Studies Education: Impressions from Three NSF Studies,” Social Education,
43 (1979), pp. 150–53.
28 .National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk: The
Imperatives for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Educa-
tion, 1983).
29 .D. L. Clark and T. A. Astuto, “The Significance and Permanence of Changes
in Federal Education Policy,” Educational Researcher 15, no. 7 (1986), pp. 4–13.
30 .See: Barbara Miner,, “National Education Summit” Rethinking Schools 14, no.
2 (Winter 1999/2000), p. 3, 8.
31 .E. Wayne Ross, “Resisting the Tyranny of Tests,” Z Magazine 14, nos. 7/8
(July/August 2001), pp. 83–88, http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/
jul01ross.htm.
32 .David W. Hursh, “Discourse, Power and Resistance in New York: The Rise
of Testing and Accountability and the Decline of Teacher Professionalism and Lo-
cal Control,” in Discourse, Power and Resistance: Challenging the Rhetoric of Con-
temporary Education, ed. Jerome Satterthwaite, Elizabeth Atkinson, and Ken Gale
(Stoke on Trent, UK: Trentham Books, 2003); David W. Hursh and Camille
Martina, “Neoliberalism and Schooling in the U.S.: How State and Federal Gov-
ernment Education Policies Perpetuate Inequality,” Journal for Critical Education

Notes_199-222.pmd 211 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

212 Notes

Policy Studies 1, no. 2 (2003), http://www.jceps.com/?pageID=article&articleID
=12.
33 .See http://www.RougeForum.org.
34 .See http://www.commonsenseineducation.org.
35 .See http://www.timeoutfromtesting.org.
36 .Michael W. Apple, The State and the Politics of Knowledge (New York:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).
37 .Apple, The State and the Politics of Knowledge, p. 3.
38 .This point is further exemplified by the lobbying attempts of Kati Haycock
and the Education Trust to force higher education to adhere to established K–12
standards, an ironic twist from earlier times when colleges set the standards for the
schools. See: Kati Haycock, “The Role of Higher Education in The Standards Move-
ment,” in 1999 National Education Summit Briefing Book (Washington, DC:
Achieve, Inc., 1999), http://www.achieve.org/achieve/achievestart.nsf.

CHAPTER 9
1 .Business Roundtable, Continuing the Commitment: Essential Components of
a Successful Education System (Washington, DC: Business Roundtable, 1995), p. 1,
2 .Business Roundtable, Workforce Training and Development for U.S. Competi-
tiveness (Washington, DC: Business Roundtable, 1995), p. 1, http://www.brtable.
org.
3 .Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: An Evi-
dence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Im-
plications for Reading Instruction (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education,
2000); Duane Alexander (testimony before the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and
Human Services, and Education of the Senate Appropriations Committee, U. S.
Senate), 2000, http:// www.nichd.nih.gov.
4 .Reid Lyon (testimony before the Subcommittee on Education Reform, Com-
mittee on Education and the Workforce, 2001), http://www.edworkforce.
house.gov.
5 .Norman R. Augustine, Ed Lupberger, and James F. Orr III, A Common
Agenda for Improving American Education (Washington, DC: Business Roundtable,
1996), p. 1, http://www.businessroundtable.org/search/index.aspx.
6 .Report of the 21st Century Workforce Commission, A Nation of Opportunity:
Building America’s 21st Century Workforce (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Labor, 2000).
7 .Augustine, Lupberger, and Orr III, A Common Agenda for Improving Ameri-
can Education.
8 .Norman R. Augustine, A Business Leader’s Guide to Setting Academic
Standards (Washington, DC: Business Roundtable, 1997), http://www.
businessroundtable.org/publications.
9 .“Business Group Is Force in Education,” The Baltimore Sun, 31 January 1998,
p. 1B.
10 .Business Roundtable, Workforce Training and Development for U.S. Competi-
tiveness.

Notes_199-222.pmd 212 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes 213

11 .Augustine, A Business Leader’s Guide to Setting Academic Standards.
12 .Barbara Foorman and Jack M. Fletcher, “Correcting Errors,” Phi Delta
Kappan 84 (2003), p. 719.
13 .Elaine M. Garan, Resisting Reading Mandates: How to Triumph with the Truth
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002).
14 .J. A. Krol, “Statement on Voluntary National Testing” (Washington, DC:
Business Roundtable, 1998), http://www.brtable.org.
15 .For an extensive discussion of this see Alan D. Flurkey and Jingguo Xu, eds.,
On the Revolution of Reading: The Selected Writings of Kenneth S. Goodman (Ports-
mouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).
16 .National Council of Teachers of English, Position Statement on Reading (Ur-
bana, IL: NCTE, 2001), http://www.ncte.org/about/over/positions/level/gen/
107666.htm; National Council of Teachers of English, On Government Intrusion
into Professional Decision Making (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1997), http://
www.ncte.org/about/over/positions/category/gov/107476.htm.
17 .Lyon’s comments were made on November 18, 2002, as part of a major policy
forum with U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige called “Rigorous Evidence: The
Key to Progress in Education?” A webcast of the panel, as well as transcripts of the
panel, can be accessed at: http://www.excelgov.org.

CHAPTER 10
1 .Magda Lewis and Barbara Karin, “Queer Stories/Straight Talk: Tales from
the School Playground,” Theory Into Practice 33, no. 3 (1994), p. 200.
2 .Lesbian and Straight Education Network Gay, “The 2003 National School
Climate Survey,” (Washington, D.C.: Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network,
2003). All statistics in this paragraph are from this report.
3 .Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, “Making
School Safe for Gay and Lesbian Youth,” (Boston: 1993).
4 .Robert Kourany, “Suicide among Homosexual Adolescents,” Journal of Ho-
mosexuality 13, no. 4 (1987);, Gary Remafedi,. et al. Remafedi, “Risk Factors for
Attempted Suicide in Gay and Bisexual Youth,” Pediatrics 87, no. 6 (1991).
5 .Deborah P. Britzman, Lost Subjects, Contested Objects (Albany, NY: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1998);, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Dis-
cursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: RoutlegeRoutledge, 1993)..
6 .Judith P. Butler, Bodies That Matter;: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. (New
York: Routledge, 1993) Judith P. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver-
sion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999)., Linda J. Nicholson, Feminism/
Postmodernism (Thinking Gender) (New York: Routledge, 1989).
7 .R. W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).
8 .Margaret Smith Crocco, “The Missing Discourse About Gender and Sexual-
ity in the Social Studies,” Theory Into Practice 40, no. 1 (2001);, Debbie Epstein,
“Keeping Them in Their Place: Hetero/Sexist Harassment, Gender and the Enforce-
ment of Heterosexuality,” in Sex, Sensibility and the Gendered Body, ed. Janet Hol-
land and L. Adkins (London: Macmillan, 1996).
9 .Michael Warner and Social Text Collective., Fear of a Queer Planet : Queer
Politics and Social Theory, Cultural Politics, vol. 6 (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1993), p. xxi.

Notes_199-222.pmd 213 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

214 Notes

10 .Dennis Sumara and Brent Davis, “Interrupting Heteronormativity: Toward
a Queer Curriculum Theory,” Curriculum Inquiry 29, no. 2 (1999), p. 193.
11 .Mollie C. Blackburn, “Disrupting the (Hetero)Normative: Exploring Literacy
Performances and Identity Work with Queer Youth,” Journal of Adolescent and Adult
Literacy 46, no. 4 (2002).
12 .Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”.
13 .Crocco, “The Missing Discourse About Gender and Sexuality in the Social
Studies.”.
14 .Sumara and Davis, “Interrupting Heteronormativity.: Toward a Queer Cur-
riculum Theory.”

CHAPTER 11
1 .For more information on the nature of this criticism, see A. R. Sadovnik, P.
W. Cookson, and S. F. Semel, Exploring Education: An Introduction to the Founda-
tions of Education, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001); Joel Spring, The Ameri-
can School 1642-2000, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001); and Joel Spring,
American Education, 10th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002).
2 .A. W. Jackson and G. A. Davis, Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents
in the 21st Century: A Report of the Carnegie Corporation of New York (New York:
Teachers College Press, 2000).
3 .C. M. Steele, “A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Iden-
tity and Performance,” American Psychologist 52 (1997), pp. 613–29.
4 .Gloria Ladson-Billings and B. Tate, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Edu-
cation,” Teachers College Record 97, no. 1 (1995) pp. 47–67.
5 .D. Y. Ford, Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students: Prom-
ising Practices and Programs (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996), p. 5.
6 .W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Modern Library, 2003,
reprint 1903).
7 .Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (New York: Hakims,
1993, reprint 1933).
8 .J. E. Hale, Learning While Black: Creating Educational Excellence for Afri-
can American Children (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2001).
9 .Ladson-Billings and Tate, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education.”
10 .D. Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York:
Basic Books, 1992).
11 .Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Just What Is Critical Race Theory and What’s It
Doing in a Nice Field Like Education?” Qualitative Studies in Education 11, no. 1
(1998), pp. 7–24.
12 .Ladson-Billings and Tate, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education”; W.
F. Tate, “Critical Race Theory and Education: History, Theory, and Implications,”
Review of Research in Education 22 (1997), pp. 195–247.
13 .Ladson-Billings and Tate, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education”;
Cornell West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
14 .J. C. Bruce, “Why and How We Teach the Negro about Himself in the Wash-
ington Public Schools,” The Journal of Negro Education 22, no. 1 (1937), pp. 38–
43.

Notes_199-222.pmd 214 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes 215

15 .H. Richard Milner, “A Case Study of an African American English Teacher’s
Cultural Comprehensive Knowledge and (Self) Reflective Planning,” Journal of
Curriculum and Supervision 18, no. 2 (2003), pp. 175–96; H. Richard Milner,
“Teacher Reflection and Race in Cultural Contexts: History, Meaning, and Meth-
ods in Teaching,” Theory Into Practice 42, no. 3 (2003), pp. 170–72; and H. Rich-
ard Milner, “Reflection, Racial Competence, and Critical Pedagogy: How Do We
Prepare Preservice Teachers to Pose Tough Questions?” Race, Ethnicity, and Edu-
cation 6, no. 2 (2003), pp. 193–208.
16 .Lee S. Shulman, “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Re-
form,” Harvard Educational Review 19, no. 2 (1987), pp. 4–14.
17 .Milner, “A Case Study of an African American English Teacher’s Cultural
Comprehensive Knowledge and (Self) Reflective Planning.”
18 .G. McCutcheon, Developing the Curriculum: Solo and Group Deliberation
(Troy: Educators’ Press International, 2002); and William H. Schubert, Curricu-
lum: Perspectives, Paradigms, and Possibilities (New York: Macmillan, 1986).
19 .Milner, “Teacher Reflection and Race in Cultural Contexts.”
20 .James A. Banks and Cherry A. M. Banks, Multicultural Education: Issues and
Perspectives, 4th ed. (New York: Wiley, 2000); and G. Gay and T. Howard,
“Multicultural Teacher Education for the 21st Century,” The Teacher Educator 35,
no. 1 (2000), pp. 1–16.
21 .R. Burke-Spero, “Toward a Model of ‘CIVITAS’ Through an Ethic of Care:
A Qualitative Study of Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions about Learning to Teach
Diverse Student Populations” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1999); and
Milner, “Reflection, Racial Competence, and Critical Pedagogy.”
22 .J. E. Helms, Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); J. E. Helms, “An Update of Helms’s White
and People of Color Racial Identity Models,” in Handbook of Multicultural Coun-
seling, eds. J. G. Ponterotto, J. M. Casas, L. A. Suzuki, and C. M. Alexander (Thou-
sand Oaks, CA: Sage); and J. E. Helms and R. T. Carter, “Development of the White
Racial Identity Attitude Inventory,” in Black and White Racial Identity Inventory:
Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. J. E. Helms (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990).
23 .W. Rowe, S. K. Bennett, and D. R. Atkinson, “White Racial Identity Mod-
els: A Critique and Alternative Proposals,” The Counseling Psychologist 22 (1994),
pp. 129–46.
24 .W. E. Cross, “The Psychology of Nigresence: Revising the Cross Model,” in
Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, eds. J. G. Ponterotto, J. M. Casas, L. A.
Suzuki, and C. M. Alexander (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995).
25 .Ford, Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students; bell hooks,
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge,
1994).
26 .C. B. Dillard, “Cultural Consideration in Paradigm Proliferation” (paper pre-
sented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New
Orleans, 24–28 April 2000).
27 .Michael W. Apple and N. King, “Economics and Control in Everyday School
Life,” in Ideology and Curriculum, ed. Michael W. Apple (New York: Routledge,
1990), 43–60.
28 .Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970).

Notes_199-222.pmd 215 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

216 Notes

29 .Dillard, “Cultural Consideration in Paradigm Proliferation.”
30 .Milner, “Teacher Reflection and Race in Cultural Contexts.”
31 .Ford, Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students.
32 .Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1947), p. 4.
33 .Bruce, “Why and How We Teach the Negro about Himself in the Washing-
ton Public Schools,” p. 41.
34 .Ford, Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students, p. 84.
35 .Gloria Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African-
American Children (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994); M. Foster, Black Teachers
on Teaching (New York: The New Press, 1997); and J. A. Irvine and D. E. York,
“Learning Styles and Culturally Diverse Students: A Literature Review,” in Hand-
book of Research on Multicultural Education, eds. J. A. Banks and C. A. M. Banks
(New York: Simon & Schuster/Macmillan, 1995).
36 .C. M. Steele, “A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity
and Performance,” American Psychologist 52 (1997), pp. 613–29.
37 .J. G. Ponterotto and P. D. Pederson, Preventing Prejudice: A Guide for Coun-
selors and Educators (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993).
38 .Dillard, “Cultural Considerations in Paradigm Proliferation.”
39 .Hooks, Teaching to Transgress, p. 84.
40 .Ford, Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students; Hale, Learn-
ing While Black; and H. R. Milner, “Affective and Social Issues Among High-Achiev-
ing African American Students: Recommendations for Teachers and Teacher Edu-
cation,” Action in Teacher Education 24, no. 1 (2002), pp. 81–89.

CHAPTER 12
1 .Portions of the text of this chapter were adapted from Marc’s article, “Paulo
Freire and Critical Multicultural Social Studies: One Case from the Teacher Educa-
tion Borderlands,” which appeared in 2003 in Taboo: The Journal of Culture and
Education.
2 .Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970).
3 .These experiences, these “data” (which were collected among TEP university
students through interviews and open-ended surveys and final course evaluations)
are part of a larger study we are conducting—“Contextualizing the Social Studies:
Un caso fronterizo”—among preservice teachers, secondary social studies/history
teachers and students, elementary teachers, and students and local activists. We have
envisioned and are conducting this as a community case study in our México/United
States border town that is focusing on participants’ understandings, applications, and
aspirations regarding the social studies in general and “critical multicultural social
studies” in particular (see, e.g., Curry Malott and Marc Pruyn, “‘Dirty Music,’ ‘Ex-
treme Profanity’ and ‘Questionable Activities’: A Case Study of Three Christian
Fundamentalist Teacher Education Students,” a paper presented at the College and
University Faculty Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies (Wash-
ington, DC, November 14–18, 2001).
4 .Letters to Cristina (1996), Pedagogy of the Heart (1998), Pedagogy of Freedom
(1998) and Teachers as Cultural Workers (1998).
5 .Peter McLaren, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the
Foundations of Education (New York: Longman, 1989).

Notes_199-222.pmd 216 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes 217

6 .M. Torrez, Educación Popular: Un Encuentro con Paulo Freire (Quito, Ecua-
dor: Corporación Ecuatoriana para el Desarrollo de la Comunicación, 1986).
7 .Freire’s use of “man,” “he,” and “his” throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed
should not go without comment. This usage uncritically reflected the dominant lin-
guistic patriarchal hegemony of the day. In most of his prodigious work since, how-
ever, this language was changed to “humankind,” “she/he,” and “their,” reflecting
Freire’s—and most theorists’ on the left—growing understandings of gender oppres-
sion.
8 .Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 28.
9 .Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and Reading
the World (South Hadley: Bergin & Garvey, 1987), p. 35.
10 .Freire and Macedo, Literacy, p. 27.
11 .McLaren, Life in Schools, p. 196.
12 .See Ramos’s translator’s note from Freire (1970, p. 19) and Freire and
Macedo, Literacy, p. 49.
13 .Freire and Macedo, Literacy.
14 .Leslie R. Bloom, “The Politics of Difference and Multicultural Feminism:
Reconceptualizing Education for Democracy,” Theory & Research in Social Educa-
tion 26, no. 1 (1998), pp. 30–49; Rudolfo Chávez Chávez and Jim O’Donnell,
Speaking the Unpleasant: The Politics of (Non)Engagement in the Multicultural Edu-
cational Terrain (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Rich Gibson,
“Paulo Freire and Pedagogy for Social Justice,” Theory & Research in Social Educa-
tion 27, no. 2 (1999), pp. 129–59; Colin Green, “La Guerra: Struggles in Living
and Teaching Critical Pedagogy,” Theory & Research in Social Education 29, no. 1
(1999), pp. 166–80; David W. Hursh and E. Wayne Ross, eds., Democratic Social
Education: Social Studies for Social Change (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000);
James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Text-
book Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1995); Valerie Ooka Pang, Juan Rivera,
and Maureen Gillette, “Can CUFA Be a Leader in the National Debate on Racism?”
Theory & Research in Social Education 26, no. 3 (1998), 430–6; Avner Segall, “Criti-
cal History: Implications for History/Social Studies Education,” Theory & Research
in Social Education 27, no. 3 (1999), 358–74; Kevin D. Vinson, “National Cur-
riculum Standards and Social Studies Education: Dewey, Freire, Foucault, and the
Construction of a Radical Critique,” Theory & Research in Social Education 27, no.
3 (1999), pp. 296–328; Kevin D. Vinson, “Connected Citizenship,” Theory & Re-
search in Social Education 29, no. 3 (2001), pp. 400–404.
15 .A notable exception is the intellectual space created by editor E. Wayne Ross
(coeditor of this volume) in the journal Theory & Research in Social Education (a
publication of the College and University Faculty Assembly, CUFA, of the National
Council for the Social Studies, NCSS), from the mid-1990s through 2001.
16 .Another notable exception to this general rule, in our estimation, is the Com-
mission of Social Justice in Teacher Education—of which Marc is a member. This
Commission was formed by former Presidents Edi Guyton of the Association of
Teacher Educators (ATE) and Susan Adler of the NCSS, respectively. This ATE and
NCSS Commission is cochaired by Rudolfo Chávez Chávez, who is a professor at
New México State University and a member of the ATE, and Richard Deim, a pro-
fessor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and another former president of
the NCSS. Recent years have also seen the formation of the Committee for Diver-

Notes_199-222.pmd 217 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

218 Notes

sity and Social Justice within the CUFA of the NCSS, although its formation was
membership-driven.
17 .Roberta Alquist, “Critical Pedagogy for Social Studies Teachers,” Social Studies
Review 29, no. 3 (1990), pp. 53–7; Joe L. Kincheloe, Toward a Critical Politics of
Teacher Thinking: Mapping the Postmodern (Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 1993); Peter
McLaren, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a
Postmodern Era (London: Routledge, 1995); Peter McLaren, Revolutionary
Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium (Boulder: Westview,
1997); Sonia Nieto, Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural
Education (White Plains: Longman, 1996); Christine Sleeter, Culture, Difference and
Power (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001).
18 .While criticalists, ourselves included, might label this position “mainstream”—
that is, one that does not actively seek to disrupt hegemonic structures of power—
it is important to note that this definition of what constitutes the “social studies” is
probably ascribed to by a majority of the NCSS’s predominantly secondary social
studies/history, white, middle-class, public school teacher membership, despite what
progressive elements within the organization’s leadership might prefer.
19 .National Council for the Social Studies, “What Is Social Studies?” in Curricu-
lum Standards for Social Studies (Washington, DC: National Council for the Social
Studies, 1996).
20 .Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison
Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Medea and N. Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1971); McLaren, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture; McLaren, Revolution-
ary Multiculturalism; Nieto, Affirming Diversity; Sleeter, Culture, Difference and
Power; Christine Sleeter, Multicultural Education as Social Activism (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996).
21 .For a more elaborate discussion of some of these notions, see, for example,
Marc Pruyn, Discourse Wars in Gotham-West: A Latino Immigrant Urban Tale of
Resistance and Agency (Boulder: Westview, 1999).
22 .Alquist, “Critical Pedagogy for Social Studies Teachers” p. 56.
23 .Betty Poindexter and Herb Korra, “Practicing Democracy through Equity
Education: Social Studies Curriculum Grades K-12, 1991-1997,” ERIC document
no. ED350206 (Indianapolis: Warren Township Independent School District, 1997).
24 .Peter Seixas, “From Social Studies to Cultural Studies” (paper presented at
the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago,
1997); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Stud-
ies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York:
Routledge, 1992).
25 .Joe L. Kincheloe, Getting Beyond the Facts: Teaching Social Studies/Social Sci-
ences in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); E. Wayne
Ross, The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems and Possibilities, rev. ed.
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Hursh and Ross, Democratic
Social Education.
26 .Neil O. Houser, “Multicultural Literature, Equity Education, and the Social
Studies,” Multicultural Education 4, no. 4 (1997), pp. 9–12.
27 .Charles Titus, “Social Studies Teachers and Multicultural Education: A Pilot
Study of Attitudes, Practices, and Constraints,” ERIC Document no. ED366516,

Notes_199-222.pmd 218 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes 219

1992; Marilynne Boyle-Baise, “Multicultural Social Studies: Ideology and Practice,”
Social Studies 87, no. 2 (1996), pp. 81–87.
28 .Jack Nelson, “Curmudgeons and Critics: Does Social Studies Education Need
Any More? Or Dare the Social Education Professors Build a New Social Studies?”
(paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research As-
sociation, Chicago, 1997).
29 .The examples from this section are drawn from the data of a larger study (dis-
cussed earlier) being conducted among the preservice teachers in Marc’s classroom.
30 .William Bigelow, “Once Upon A Genocide: Christopher Columbus in
Children’s Literature,” Language Arts 69, no. 2 (1992), pp. 112–20; Kincheloe,
Beyond the Facts; Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me; Howard Zinn, A People’s His-
tory of the United States: 1492–Present (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995).
31 .William Bigelow, “Social Studies Standards For What?” Rethinking Schools 16,
no. 4 (2002).
32 .Ira Shor, Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
33 .Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present: Abridged
Teaching Addition (New York: The New Press, 1997).
34 .Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 31.

CHAPTER 13
1 .Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne Ross, “In Search of the Social Studies Cur-
riculum: Standardization, Diversity, and a Conflict of Appearances,” in Critical Is-
sues in Social Studies Research for the 21st Century, ed. William B. Stanley (Green-
wich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2001), pp. 39–71; Michael W. Apple,
Democratic Education in a Conservative Age (New York: Routledge, 1993) and
Cultural Politics and Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996).
2 .Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958
(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).
3 .B. P. Fowler, “President’s Message,” Progressive Education 7, no. 4 (1930),
p. 159.
4 .George S. Counts, Dare the School Build a New Social Order (New York: John
Day, 1932), pp. 45–7.
5 .Ibid., pp. 5–8.
6 .Ibid., pp. 9–12.
7 .William B. Stanley, Curriculum for Utopia: Social Reconstructionism and Criti-
cal Pedagogy in the Postmodern Era (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
8 .Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
9 .James P. Gee, The Social Mind: Language, Ideology, and Social Practice (South
Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1992), p. 142.
10 .M. Cochran-Smith and M. K. Fries, “Sticks, Stones, and Ideology: The Dis-
course of Reform in Teacher Education,” Educational Researcher 30, no. 8 (2001),
pp. 3–15.
11 .Stanley, Curriculum for Utopia.
12 .James A. Whitson and William B. Stanley, “Re-Minding Education for De-

Notes_199-222.pmd 219 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

220 Notes

mocracy,” in Educating the Democratic Mind, ed. Walter C. Parker (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 309–36.
13 .Cochran-Smith and Fries, “Sticks, Stones, and Ideology” and L. Simcox, Whose
History: The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms (New York:
Teachers College Press, 2002).
14 .S. H. Engle and A. S. Ochoa, Education for Democratic Citizenship: Decision
Making in the Social Studies (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988); David Hill,
Peter McLaren, Michael Cole, and Glenn Rikowski, eds., Marxism Against
Postmodernism in Educational Theory (New York: Lexington, 2002).
15 .Stanley, Curriculum for Utopia.
16 .Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars (New York: Teachers College Press,
2004).
17 .John Dewey, “Education and Social Change,” The Social Frontier 3, no. 26
(1937), p. 236.
18 .John Dewey, “Can Education Share in the Social Reconstruction,” The So-
cial Frontier 1, no. 1 (1934), p. 11.
19 .John Dewey and John L. Childs, “The Social-Economic Situation and Edu-
cation,” in Educational Frontier, ed. William H. Kilpatrick (New York: D. Appleton-
Century, 1933), pp. 318–19.
20 .See Henry A. Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical Peda-
gogy in the Modern Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988) and Teachers
as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning, rev. ed. (South Hadley, MA:
Bergin & Garvey, 1988); Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars: What Should
We Teach the Children (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004); John Dewey,
Experience and Education (New York: Collier, 1938).
21 .See here, especially, Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
22 .John Dewey, “The Need for Orientation,” Forum 93, no. 6 (1935), p. 334.
23 .Dewey and Childs, “The Social-Economic Situation and Education,” p. 71.
24 .John Dewey, “Education and Social Change,” The Social Frontier 2, no. 26
(1937), pp. 235–8.
25 .Ibid., p. 235.
26 .Ibid., p. 236.
27 .John Dewey, “The Crucial Role of Intelligence,” The Social Frontier 1, no. 5
(1935), p. 9.
28 .Ibid., p. 9.
29 .Dewey, “Education and Social Change,” p. 238.
30 .Ibid., p. 238.
31 .Dewey and Childs, “The Socio-Economic Situation in Education,” p. 72.
32 .Ira Shor, Culture Wars (Boston: Routledge, 1986); John Goodlad, A Place
Called School (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984).
33 .Simcox, Whose History.
34 .National Commission on Excellence in Education [NCEE], A Nation At Risk
(Washington: USGPO, 1983).
35 .Simcox, Whose History; David Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured
Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley); NCEE, A Nation At Risk, p. 5.

Notes_199-222.pmd 220 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

Notes 221

36 .A Nation At Risk, p. 5.
37 .Simcox, Whose History.
38 .Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky, “Reforming Teacher Preparation and
Licensing: What Is the Evidence?” Teachers College Record 102, no. 1 (2000), pp.
5–27.
39 .D. T. Gordon, ed., A Nation Reformed: American Education 20 Years After
“A Nation At Risk” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); D. Ballou
and M. Podgursky, “Teacher Training and Licensure: A Layman’s Guide,” in Bet-
ter Teachers, Better Schools, ed. M. Kanstoroom and C. Finn (Washington: The Tho-
mas Fordham Foundation, 1999), pp. 31–82; and Paul E. Petersen, ed., Our Schools
and Our Future: Are We Still at Risk? (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2003).
40 .Simcox, Whose History, p. 50.
41 .William S. Lind and William H. Marshner, Cultural Conservatism: Toward a
New National Agenda (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988).
42 .Frederic Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944) and The
Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge, 1960); Milton Friedman, Capitalism
and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
43 .Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 387.
44 .Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1950).
45 .Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1991).
46 .Gerald Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003).
47 .Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984); Walter C. Parker, Teaching Democracy (New York: Teachers College Press,
2003).
48 .James S. Leming, “The Two Cultures of Social Studies Education,” Social
Education 53, no. 6 (1989), pp. 404–8; James S. Leming, “Ideological Perspectives
Within the Social Studies Profession: An Empirical Examination of the Two Cul-
tures Thesis,” Theory and Research in Social Education 20, no. 3 (1992), pp. 293–
312; James S. Leming, “Correct, But Not Politically Correct? A Response to Parker,”
Theory and Research in Social Education 20, no. 4 (1992), pp. 500–6.
49 .James S. Leming, L. Ellington, and K. Porter, eds., Where Did the Social Stud-
ies Go Wrong? (Dayton, OH: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2003).
50 .James S. Leming, “Ignorant Activists,” in Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?
ed. James S. Leming, Lucien Ellington, and Kathleen Porter (Washington, DC:
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2003).
51 .Leming, “Correct, But Not Politically Correct?”
52 .Ibid.
53 .Leming, “Ignorant Activists.”
54 .Patricia M. King and Karen Strohm Kitchener, Developing Reflective Judgment:
Understanding and Promoting Intellectual Growth and Critical Thinking in Ado-
lescents and Adults (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1994); Patricia M.
King and Karen Strohm Kitchener, “Reflective Judgment: Concepts of Justification
and Their Relationship to Age and Education,” Journal of Applied Developmental
Psychology 2 (1981), pp. 89–116; Patricia M. King and Karen Strohm Kitchener,
Reflective Judgment Scoring Manual (Denver, CO and Bowling Green, OH: Uni-
versity of Denver and Bowling Green State University, 1985).

Notes_199-222.pmd 221 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

222 Notes

55 .Leming, “Ideological Perspectives Within the Social Studies Profession,”
p .310.
56 .Leming, “Ignorant Activists,” p. 134.
57 .Ernest R. House, Schools for Sale (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998).
58 .Leming, Ellington, Porter, Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?; Evans, The
Social Studies Wars.
59 .Evans, The Social Studies Wars.
60 .Walter C. Parker, Teaching Democracy: Unity and Diversity in Public Life (New
York: Teachers College Press, 2003).
61 .Berliner and Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis; Evans, The Social Studies Wars;
William Stanley and Hope Longwell-Grice, “Ideology, Power, and Control in
Teacher Education,” in Critical Issues in Social Studies Teacher Preparation, ed. Susan
Adler (Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, in press); Kevin D. Vinson and
E. Wayne Ross, Image and Education: Teaching in the Face of the New Disciplinarity
(New York: Peter Lang, 2003).
62 .Vinson and Ross, Image and Education.
63 .Stanley, Curriculum as Utopia.
64 .James P. Gee, The Social Mind (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1992).
65 .Whitson and Stanley, “Re-minding Education for Democracy.”
66 .C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1959).

Notes_199-222.pmd 222 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

To Follow Index

About the Editors

KEVIN D. VINSON is Assistant Professor of Teaching and Teacher Edu-
cation at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in Curriculum
and Instruction, with a specialization in Social Studies Education, from the
University of Maryland. Currently, his work focuses on the philosophical and
theoretical contexts of social studies, especially with respect to questions of
power, image, culture, standardization, diversity, and social justice, as well
as on the meaning and relevance of the philosophies of Michel Foucault and
Guy Debord vis-à-vis the potential social and pedagogical relationships
among surveillance, spectacle, image, and disciplinarity. His research has
appeared in Theory and Research in Social Education, The Social Studies, and
Social Education, and has been presented at the annual meetings of the
American Educational Research Association, the American Educational
Studies Association, and the National Council for the Social Studies. He has
contributed chapters to such books as The Social Studies Curriculum: Pur-
poses, Problems, and Possibilities (edited by E. Wayne Ross); Critical Issues in
Social Studies Research for the 21st Century (edited by William Stanley); and
Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools
(edited by Kenneth Saltman and David Gabbard). He recently published his
first book (with E. Wayne Ross), entitled Image and Education: Teaching in
the Face of the New Disciplinarity.

E. WAYNE ROSS is Professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies at
the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is a former

ATA_1-00.pmd 1 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

2 About the Editors

secondary social studies and day care teacher in North Carolina and Geor-
gia and has held faculty appointments at the University of Louisville and the
State University of New York campuses at Albany and Binghamton. Ross is
the author of numerous articles and reviews on issues of curriculum theory
and practice, teacher education, and the politics of education. His books in-
clude Image and Education (with Kevin D. Vinson), The Social Studies Cur-
riculum, and Democratic Social Education (with David W. Hursh). He is the
cofounder of The Rouge Forum, a group of educators, parents, and students
working for more democratic schools and society and general editor of De-
fending Public Schools.

ATA_1-00.pmd 2 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

About the Contributors

CYNTHIA O. ANHALT received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona
in Teaching and Teacher Education with an emphasis in mathematics edu-
cation and a minor in mathematics. Anhalt was a K–8 teacher in public
schools for ten years. Her research participation has included Mathematics
Intervention for Children ages 5–15 with leukemia (project funded by the
National Cancer Institute [NCI] and National Institute of Nursing Research
[NINR]); Transition Toward Algebra (T2A) Project designed for mathemat-
ics teachers of grades 5–9; and Mathematics and Parent Partnership in the
Southwest (MAPPS) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). She
has published articles with the National Council of Teachers of Mathemat-
ics (NCTM), the Journal of Latinos and Education (JLE), and the Research
Council on Mathematics Learning (RCML). She has presented at annual
meetings, including those of the NCTM and the American Educational
Research Association. Her research interests emphasize preservice teachers’
conceptual understandings of mathematics and their use of mathematical
representations when designing lesson plans.

LEON D. CALDWELL, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psy-
chology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His research is in the area
of school and community-based prevention and health promotion interven-
tions for African American and economically disadvantaged adolescents. He
has published in the areas of African and African American psychology, edu-
cational achievement motivation, and counseling psychology. Dr. Caldwell

ATA_1-00.pmd 3 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

4 About the Contributors

has also written and lectured internationally on the topics of student devel-
opment and mental health. He teaches a summer exchange course in Ghana,
West Africa, at the University of Winneba. He is a graduate of Penn State
(Ph.D., Counseling Psychology) and Lehigh University (M.Ed., Secondary
School Counseling, B.A., Economics).

STEPHEN C. FLEURY is Professor of Education at Le Moyne College in
Syracuse, New York and codirector of the Syracuse Center for Urban Edu-
cation. The themes of his professional writings and academic activities are
in science, social studies, and teacher and urban education and emanate from
his interests in the relationships between “how one knows and how one
lives,” relationships that necessarily entail personal, social, cultural, and po-
litical factors in their production and reproduction in the contexts of school-
ing.

FOUR ARROWS, aka Don Trent Jacobs, is an Associate Professor at North-
ern Arizona University and a faculty member at Fielding Graduate Institute.
He was formerly Dean of Education at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine
Ridge Indian Reservation. His books include Indigenous Worldviews: First
Nations Scholars Challenge Anti-Indian Hegemony, American Assassination:
The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone, Teaching Virtues: Building Char-
acter Across the Curriculum, The Bum’s Rush: The Selling of Environmental
Backlash, and Primal Awareness.

ROB HAWORTH is a doctoral student at New México State University.
Currently, he is an instructor for the elementary and secondary social stud-
ies methods courses in the Teacher Education Program. His areas of research
include: youth culture, critical pedagogy, youth resistance, and globalization
and anarchist pedagogy.

RITA L. IRWIN is Professor of Curriculum Studies and Art Education and
Head of the Department of Curriculum Studies at the University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Her most recent work combines her
longstanding interest in qualitative forms of research with understanding
pedagogy through self-study and a/r/tography (a methodology that unites
image and text through theory, practice and research). She is an artist, re-
searcher, and teacher who is committed to the arts as living inquiry. As such,
she continues to create art, conduct research, and practice her pedagogy in
ways that are integrative, reflective, and full of living awareness.

BRUCE JOHNSON is Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching
and Teacher Education, Associate Faculty in the College of Science Teacher
Preparation Program, and Director of the Earth Education Research and
Evaluation Team at the University of Arizona. He teaches courses in elemen-

ATA_1-00.pmd 4 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

About the Contributors 5

tary science methods, adolescent development and learning theory, environ-
mental learning, and cognition in science education. Dr. Johnson began his
teaching career as a middle school teacher, focusing on both science and
mathematics. He later taught in an elementary school where his focus was
on science for students in the upper grades. In addition, he served as an
outdoor school director for several years. Johnson’s research focuses on two
areas of science education: classroom learning environments (including the
perceptions of students and teachers) and environmental learning (includ-
ing teacher and student understanding of ecological concepts).

LISA W. LOUTZENHEISER is Assistant Professor in the Department of
Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia. Prior to pursing
a doctorate, she taught in public alternative schools. She combines a fasci-
nation with curriculum, queer/gender, and poststructural theories, as well
as the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in schooling to look at the
experiences of marginalized youth. A second strand of her research and ac-
tivism flows from the statements of youth in alternative settings that they
learn best when strong connections are made with teachers and with their
own lives and identities. Therefore, she is also interested in exploring how
sometimes difficult and controversial issues, such as heteronormativity and
racism, can be brought into both K–12 and teacher education courses.

PERRY M. MARKER, Ph.D., has taught secondary social studies in Ohio,
and he currently teaches social studies teacher education, curriculum theory
and research, and history and philosophy of education in the School of Edu-
cation at Sonoma State University, California, where he is Professor and Chair
of the Department of Curriculum Studies and Secondary Education. He was
awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study the history, education, and culture
of Brazil in 1987. He has made presentations at international, national, and
state conferences, coauthored a social studies methods textbook, and has
written numerous articles related to democratic education and the ideas of
Paulo Freire.

H. RICHARD MILNER, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Teaching and Learning at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. His
research interests concern three interrelated areas: Curriculum Theory and
Research, Academic Achievement and Cultural and Racial Diversity. His work
has appeared in Teaching and Teacher Education, Race, Ethnicity and Edu-
cation, the Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, the Journal of Negro Edu-
cation, Theory into Practice, The High School Journal, Teachers and Teaching:
Theory and Practice,the Journal of Critical Inquiry into Curriculum and
Instruction, Action in Teacher Education, Teacher Education and Practice,
Gifted Child Quarterly, and Teaching Education. He earned the Ph.D. and
M.A. (Curriculum Studies) from The Ohio State University, and the M.A.T.

ATA_1-00.pmd 5 7/19/2004, 8:29 AM

6 About the Contributors

and B.A. (English) from South Carolina State University.

IRA E. MURRAY is a graduate student in Human, Organizational, and
Community Development at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. His
research interests focus on community development in disadvantaged areas.
Originally from Columbia, South Carolina, he is a graduate of Florida A&M
University.

ELIZABETH OBERLE began her Montessori experiences at the age of three
in a Montessori school attached to the State University of New York at Stony
Brook. She received her Montessori Children’s House (3–6 years) certifi-
cate through AMI–St. Louis Training Centre in 1994 and her master’s de-
gree from Loyola College in Baltimore in 1995. She has been teaching in
the public Montessori system of the Kansas City School District since 1993.

MARC PRUYN earned his Ph.D. in curriculum at UCLA, and now works
at New México State University as an associate professor of Social Studies
Education and as the Director of Elementary Education. His research in-
terests include exploring the connections among education for social justice,
multiculturalism, critical pedagogy and theory, and the social studies in the
Chihuahuan Borderlands and beyond. His areas of expertise include curricu-
lum theory, educational foundations, and research methodologies.

ELISABETH ROBERTS is a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona and
is a member of the Earth Education Research and Evaluation Team. As a
research associate with MJ Young and Associates and WestEd, she conducted
national program evaluations and teacher professional development for the
NSF and U.S. Department of Education, and was a fellow in NSF’s National
Academy for Science and Mathematics Education Leadership. At TERC in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Roberts was a member of the team that created
the National Geographic Kids Network, IBM Personal Science Laboratory, and
TableTop and TableTop Jr. software and curriculum. She is a co-author or
author of Hands on Elementary Science, a program that introduces elemen-
tary teachers to inquiry science and technology. Her research at TERC in-
vestigated how teachers used technology to support data collection and
analysis and build learning communities. She currently studies how visual
representations of ecology concepts, such as systems, contribute to students’
cognition.

MARTHA RAPP RUDDELL is currently Interim Dean of the School of
Education, Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. Previously
she taught in the secondary teaching credential program and the graduate
Reading and Language advanced credential and degree programs. Ruddell
taught for ten years in both rural and city schools in Missouri and Kansas.

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About the Contributors 7

She is author of numerous articles and book chapters and a text about ado-
lescent literacy titled Teaching Content Reading and Writing that is now in
its fourth edition. She is past president of the National Reading Conference,
an international educational organization devoted to research in language
and literacy. In 1996, she was inducted into the California Reading Asso-
ciation Reading Hall of Fame, and in 2003 she was honored with the Albert
J. Kingston Service Award of the National Reading Conference.

REBECCA SÁNCHEZ is a doctoral student in the Department of Curricu-
lum and Instruction at New México State University. Her area of special-
ization is critical pedagogy. Her research interests include critical theory,
teacher education, and social justice issues in education. She is the program
coordinator for Project Literacy, a program dedicated to recruiting, retain-
ing, and funding Borderlands teachers for M.A. degrees in bilingual educa-
tion and TESOL.

WILLIAM B. STANLEY currently serves as Dean of Education at
Monmouth University in New Jersey. He is a former social studies teacher
who taught for fourteen years before moving on to higher education. He
received a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from Rutgers Univer-
sity and has taught at Louisiana State University, the University of Delaware,
and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of numerous ar-
ticles, book chapters, two edited books, and Curriculum for Utopia (1992).
His research and publications have focused on social studies education, cur-
riculum theory, and educational reform. Among his most recent work is an
edited book, Critical Issues in Social Studies for the 21st Century (2002). Over
the past seventeen years he has served as Department Chair and Interim Dean
at the University of Delaware, as Dean of Education at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, and as Founding Dean at the University of Redlands,
California. He is a member of the Professors of Curriculum Association and
currently serves on the NCATE Board of Examiners.

STEVEN L. STRAUSS is a neurologist at the Franklin Square Hospital in
Baltimore, Maryland. His research interests are in the linguistics and neu-
rology of reading and the politics of phonics. Previously, he served as Pro-
fessor of Neurology at the University of Maryland Medical Systems in
Baltimore and also as Professor of Linguistics at the University of New
Mexico, where he was on the faculty of the educational linguistics doctoral
program. He is a former Fulbright Scholar in linguistics and
neurolinguistics in Vienna, Austria.

ROBIN A. WARD is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at the
University of Arizona. Prior to receiving her Ph.D. from the University of
Virginia in 1997, Dr. Ward spent seven years in industry working as an aero-

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8 About the Contributors

space engineer. From 1997 to 2000, she served as an Assistant Professor of
Mathematics at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo,
California, where she taught elementary mathematics, precalculus, and tech-
nology courses, and received grants from the NASA Dryden Flight Research
Center to develop web-based mathematics lesson plans for K–12 teachers that
showcase a variety of NASA Dryden research projects. She has also received
an Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement (ILI) grant from the Na-
tional Science Foundation providing for the establishment of a Mathemat-
ics Education Center on Cal Poly’s campus equipped with state-of-the-art
technology and a major technology grant from the U.S. Department of
Education to train university of Arizona faculty and preservice teachers in
effective uses of technology. Ward has written and presented papers at many
national conferences, addressing the effective uses of technology in math-
ematics classrooms. She also works on K–8 preservice teachers’ conceptual
understandings of various mathematical topics, as well as their use of math-
ematical representations when designing lesson plans.

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