Civics, Financial Handicap, and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Issue 2 of 7Plus, an education news and critical theory bulletin
This week’s issue covers the comeback and potential of civic courses, an edtech solution to increasing inclusiveness through mapping social networks, how to fix the financial aid system, as well as the continued importance of Freire’s ideas today.
Local Education News
Philly SRC departs with busy meeting [source]
June 22, 2018 | Bessam Idani, Avi Wolfman-Arent, & Dale Mezzacappa | WHYY
Summary The last set of meetings were held by the School Reform Commission on Thursday, and highlights of their results include barring suspensions for first- and second-graders, except in cases when they cause bodily injury, as well as decisions surrounding the signing of the new performance framework for charter schools and their renewal or discontinuation — 8 out of the 33 charters recommended for renewal agreed to the framework, while the rest will continue without valid charter agreements in hope that the new school board would tend more favorable terms; the commission also closed one school — the Architecture and Design Charter High School.
Significance As with last issue’s article on the setting up of the new performance framework, increased performance accountability for charter schools (coupled with increased financial accountability following the push for legislation to bar charter schools from leasing buildings they own back to themselves) could see more public funds and stranded costs return to improving district schools, while the closure of charter schools could also disrupt the lives of many students, and further impact less privileged students should overall educational resources decline. The results from the SRC’s final meetings still leaves a lot for the new school board to resolve.
‘Enough is enough’: Philly school unions boiling over assaults on staff [source]
June 15, 2018 | Kristen A. Graham & Claudia Irizarry-Aponte | The Inquirer
Summary Unions representing Philadelphia school administrators and teachers this school year rallied against violence and assaults on staff that have continued despite reforms in response to the Frank Bard incident a decade ago, including the establishment of a teacher-safety hotline and implement more stringent penalties for offenders. Some have responded with a call for more security, to “revisit the Sandusky Act, which prevents school staff from touching students — even when breaking up a fight”, and that “adults be criminally charged for assaults on staff”. Others have proposed more upstream solutions such as “programs, services, and more counselors to identify behaviors that a child might be on the wrong path”, and “healing that is going to bring back those families to a sense of community”.
Significance If the former approach is adopted to address the violence, tensions between the staff, students, and parents could further escalate. However, some regulations seem necessary at least until ways to address the upstream issues of the lack of community and available resources to support students at an earlier stage are conceived and implemented. It is imperative for education reformers to continue investigating this angle further.
Regional Education News
Building social connections for LGBTQ students with data and tech-enhanced curriculum [source]
June 18, 2018 | Jenny Abamu | EdSurge
Summary Minnesota’s St. Paul Public Schools district’s Out for Equity program is one of the first of many such programs designing policies and implementing tech-enhanced curriculum that address issues of inclusion, from sexuality and gender identity to the emergence of non-traditional family types. One interesting initiative under the program is an online survey tool called Classroom Dynamics that generates sociograms that show connections between students, highlighting isolated students and kids that might be mistreating other kids.
Significance Research has shown that if kids do not have a connection with a handful of people throughout the school year, their sense of belonging and connection to the school is very low, increasing their likelihood of dropping out. Efforts to retain students in school might be similarly improved through developing a similar survey and network building program to identify and provide for students most at risk of dropping out.
In the age of Trump, civics courses make a comeback [source]
June 5, 2018 | Alina Tugend | The New York Times
Summary A new initiative, a four-year program called Original Civic Research and Action, has been rolled out at Mamaronek High School, which requires students to immerse themselves in the community of their town of Mamaroneck and find a useful solution to an ongoing problem. The aim of this and other such programs cropping up is to address “a lack of understanding of and trust in most civic institutions, a disconnection from government at all levels and intolerance for those who think and act differently”.
Significance While the capacity for engagement with politics at a higher level emerges with privilege, the less-affluent students that education equity organizations tend to work with could also benefit from some focus on community involvement. This is especially the case since many issues impact them personally to a greater degree, such as gentrification, or the degradation of physical school environment. This process has been demonstrated to positively affect students’ academic performance while engaging them more deeply in learning. As the teacher starting the initiative says, “the goal is not just to produce informed citizens, but citizens who know how to make change”.
Financial aid letters often hide the real cost of college… [source]
June 5, 2018 | Alvin Chang | Vox
Summary uAspire, an organization that helps low-income students get to college, has helped low-income students parse through their financial aid letters. They found these letters to be incredibly complex and hard to understand, and recently conducted a study with help from New America, analyzing 515 financial aid letters from 455 schools to understand just how widespread this problem is. Some of their findings include:
- Only about 40 percent of colleges in the study told students how much they’d need to pay — and even then, schools had different ways of calculating that amount, which made it difficult to compare costs.
- The letters had 136 ways to describe an unsubsidized student loan — and 24 of them didn’t even use the word “loan.”
- Majority of schools do not follow the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators’ code of conduct for its member schools to meet a certain standard of clarity
- Fewer than half of colleges receiving federal funds use the ‘Shopping Sheet’, the US Department of Education’s template for schools to follow to provide a clearer, more consistent format for their aid letters
“Creating federal guidelines for these letters is just a commonsense reform”, and schools should not be allowed to “lure students by making their school seem more affordable than it actually is”.
Significance The findings from the report can help provide more issue attention and evidence for funding programs targeted at helping students interpret their post-secondary options and reducing summer melt. Additionally, it could be worthwhile to consider investing more energies into creating a system similar to the ‘Shopping Sheet’ to better clarify the cost comparison across options for our students.
Group looks for new ways to peer over the edtech horizon [source]
June 15, 2018 | Jeffrey R. Young | EdSurge
Summary Organization being built to track edtech trends called the Future of Education and Everything community, or FOEcast. The Horizon Report, another project covering trends, challenges, and important developments in edtech, is also slated to continue, with Educause, a major edtech association in higher ed, taking it on following the dissolution of the New Media Consortium. While similar, Educause traditionally “tends to look at the technology first and then work their way backward to instruction” while many working on FOEcast “tend to look at instruction first and work [their] way back to tech”.
Significance It might be beneficial to be aware of and tap on these resources as they might illuminate potential areas for synergies with existing and future programs.
Examining Education Critically
Pedagogy of the Oppressed [source]
1968/1970 | Paulo Freire, trans. Myra Ramos
Summary Freire writes about how education in his context was oppressive, mirroring colonization and other unequal societal practices and hierarchies. He argues that this oppression is sustained by as well as reflected in a banking concept of education, in which “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing”, negating knowledge as “a process of inquiry” and serving the “interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed or see it transformed”. Banking education involves teachers feeding information to students, anonymization of students and memorization and regurgitation. He proposes a transition to a problem-posing approach, in which students have an equal relationship with the teacher, and are allowed and encouraged to ask why, actively participate in what they want to learn and be able to apply their knowledge, ultimately developing an awareness of one’s social place and role and impact in society in/on the world.
Significance While written a long time ago, Freire’s ideas about education as oppressive and the need for students to be able to create, inquire, and transform is arguably as or more important today given the shifting of the dominance of political goals of education to the social mobility, as discussed in last week’s newsletter, leading to further inequality as well as the diminishing of love for learning. Educational equity organizations and educators can strive to align their practices with Freire’s problem-posing approach, and allow students to engage with what they believe is important and want to learn, while balancing it with enabling them to succeed in our social mobility focused education and society, which unfortunately necessitates a degree of pursuing credentials over meaningful learning.
Please share this with education equity actors you know that would find it useful; as always, feedback and comments on how I can make this more useful are much appreciated!
