Elizabeth Bechtel

Favorite Quotes from _The Great Gatsby_

2008-05-17T11:38:00.001-07:00

"James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.
I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of the bracing days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorbtion he took for granted.
But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.
An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore. " - favorite quotes from the _Great Gatsby_

Admission!

2007-11-16T18:06:00.000-08:00

Hooray!
I've just been admitted to the PhD program at the U of M--and assigned to the advisor I requested! I start in January :-)
Weird thing about universities, though: I was emailed a form for "Residency Reclassification" to fill out before I discovered (only through logging in to my online ap) that I had been actually been admitted. The same thing happened to me when I was admitted to Stanford--I received an email from a "Stanford buddy" and a list of dorms to choose from before it was finally "admitted" that I was "admitted."
I'm still really excited to begin...

Accounting for Diamonds with the GAO

2007-11-14T09:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06978.pdf

According to the Government Office of Accountability, the US is EXPORTING more diamonds than it imports! This, of course, presents a fascinating problem, since the US does not have a single working diamond mine--ergo, we should logically be importing more than we export. In addition, the US is not a "cutting center"--Israel, India, and Antwerp are the main locations for cutting (so there is really no viable reason that the US should be exporting so many).
According to the GAO, in 2003, there were 3 million more carats exported than imported in the US. By 2005, the US Census reported an excess of 300,000 carats over our number of imports.
This suggests either that:
1) The US is laundering diamonds (don't think I'm being melodramatic here--the GAO suggested it first!)
2) The US's manner of accounting for diamonds is totally off
or 3) (my own idea of what's going on): since the US method of accounting for diamonds does not include the stock surplus of what is already in America, perhaps jewelers, wholesalers, etc. are EXPORTING their current stocks to make diamonds seem rarer than they actually are, in order to maintain current pricing (i.e., if the supply seems small, the demand should logically go up).

Homeless vets and Housing

2007-11-12T14:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.endhomelessness.org/content/article/detail/1839

Veterans of foreign wars are disproportionately likely to become homeless, despite holding higher levels of education and a higher socioeconomic status than the general population. Veterans represent roughly 26 percent of homeless people, but only 11 percent of the civilian population 18 years and older. This is true despite the fact that veterans are better educated, more likely to be employed, and have a lower poverty rate than the general population. The number of homeless vets is likely expected to rise with the return of recent veterans from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While vets will not be immediately face homelessness (i.e., there was some delay before vets of Vietnam became homeless), perhaps the impending scenario can be prevented through good policy.
It is highly ironic that, at a time when foreclosure rates are soaring from the subprime meltdown, veterans should be homeless. While government spending can prop the economy up (as witnessed by the WPA projects of the Great Depression), in this case it can solve two problems at once: what I propose is this--rather than allowing lenders to purchase the homes at fire-sale prices off the auction block, perhaps the government should start purchasing these homes in strategic locations to use as group homes or for homeless vets to use, while getting on their feet.

Springtime in Minnesota poem

2007-03-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

Spring
When the ice houses slip through thin ice
And old men flee their winter’s sinking habitat
As if it were the Titanic
To return, for another six months, to their wives’ open arms;
Their homes, their bickering, and their lefse

They return to the lives that winter months put on hold
Just as the fabled cod they hunted, frozen beneath the surface, swims towards spring

Honey-do projects, hand tools, and their lawn mowers await them
Like Penelope longing for her hero’s return
Spring! melting snow
like butter melted over warm lefse
A sweet end to a year of lutefisk, and a new beginning
A return to romance
And lawns
And road trips

And days spent sitting in a lawn chair, dreaming
Of ice fishing once more

Indian schools to be built with proceeds from "Breakfast at Tiffany's" dress

2007-03-05T09:20:00.000-08:00

http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=253421&GT1=7701

This is cool news! Fifteen schools are to be built with the proceeds from an auction of Audrey Hepburn's iconic "Breakfast at Tiffany's" dress. Now, every time I see one of my favorite movies, I will think of Indian schools, too.

The Most-Cited Paper

2007-01-24T09:41:00.000-08:00

I am excited to report that Jay's paper, "Three-dimensional shape searching: state-of-the-art review and future trends" has just been awarded the most-cited paper of the year award. I remember that Jay and the late Natraj Iyer collaborated, pulling all-nighters in the lab to complete and revise the paper, and I am very proud of their achievement. This award is just more evidence that hard work always pays off.

The Colts are Headed to the Superbowl

2007-01-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

Jay’s beloved Indianapolis Colts won the playoff and are headed to the Superbowl! Nobody thought that the Colts would win, but to watch the score creep up and up edging towards a tie was exciting. The touchdown that brought the win is still etched in my mind. To see the Colts beat the Patriots was particularly thrilling for an old Packer fan like me who still recalls the miracle Superbowl where Green Bay beat the Patriots. Watching Jay cheer his team, I could almost see my late father cheering on his Pack.

The Future of Housing?

2007-01-16T08:37:00.000-08:00

What is the future of housing? Ever since I was a child reading about Buckminster Fuller's geodessic dome-homes, I have been fascinated by the improvements in architecture. But I have also seen evidence of the many flops and flubs--the undesireable washable "space age" houses of the '40s and '50s, the build-in-a-day kits, and the prefabricated buildings that look, well, prefabricated. But considering all of our technological improvements, what is it that keeps us glued to our traditional homes, with their poor ventilation, their structural flaws, and their excessive cost? I have been reading Pierre Bourdieu's The Social Structures of the Economy, which describes purchasing housing as a social, economic, and anthropological act, in order to unravel the mystery of why we are so tied to tradition that we even avoid features that are great improvements. The rejected dome-home boasted great energy efficiency, self-vacuuming floors (via a gap between floorboards), and structural strength--but did not meet the aesthetics traditionalists desired.
I believe that the future of the housing market could go one of two ways--either undergoing a radical design change, or undergoing a miniaturization. Arguably, GenX'ers do not buy products targeted to their socieconomic niche (this is why GM is foundering--it's still pitching cars to specific price ranges--i.e., "the car for those who earn $30,000 a year," "the car for those who earn $50,000 a year"), but products they like. Usually, these happen to be "lifestyle products," many of which support a vision of sustainability.
Exemplifying the radical-shift housing paradigm is the robo-built home constructed of concrete and gypsum. Costing approximately one-fifth of the current housing price, and built in a time frame between one day and one week (depending on the intricacies of design), robo-built houses may make inroads on the basis of sustainability and low cost.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2546574,00.html

Exemplifying the traditional house made sustainable is the Hurricane Katrina cottage, which cost roughly $35,000 to build, and come in various designs and floorplans. Energy efficient and storm-resistant, these houses may soon find their way to lots across the country.

http://www.cusatocottages.com/index_content.html

Arguably, since Americans tend to be traditionalists, the most traditional-looking designs usually win the market. Unless the robo-built homes can find a way to mask themselves as traditional, it is most likely Marianne Cusato's cottages will be the new "gold standard."

Decorating with Books

2006-12-16T15:46:00.000-08:00

http://biz.yahoo.com/weekend/smartgift_1.html

It's a sad indictment of our culture when people are more interested in decorating with books than actually reading them. Thoreau once called books the fit inheritance of man, although I doubt he had their use as a decoration in mind. "Books by the foot" have become all the rage, and are a major source of income for used booksellers. While a certain set of fashionistas adorn their dwellings with books, educators similarly decorate their classrooms with books that students never read in order to gain points on researchers' checklists. I don't know if people actually believe that ideas are passed through osmosis, but as any college student who has fallen asleep with their head on a textbook can attest--ideas are not transmitted in such an easy way. Gaining knowledge requires work. To become intelligent about the contents of a book requires actually reading it. There is no "royal road" to learning.

It is interesting to consider that people who are true lovers of books often attempt to hide the "paper mess" that books create, embarrassed by their wealth of knowledge, while those who care least for books show them off.

In this milieu, books serve as a poor indicant of knowledge. I read the other day, however, that vegetarians have an IQ an average of 5 points higher than non-vegetarians. Perhaps diet--requiring a certain action/in-action on the part of an individual--serves a better indicant of an individual's intelligence. (Of course, this would not serve as a perfect indicant in India, since vegetarianism is tied to religion and tradition rather than being motivated by individual thoughtfulness; nevertheless, vegetarianism might serve as a fair indicant in the US).

Wikis for Democracy

2006-12-15T08:05:00.000-08:00

I'm impressed by the new idea that wikis can be used to allow citizens to directly write and revise legislation. Since I, myself, enjoy editing wikipedia articles and correcting factual or grammatical errors, I am sure that wiki legislation writing would find a following. It is interesting to think that although we thought the ancient polis was dead, all citizens can potentially participate directly in governance once again, thanks to technology.

The entire wiki phenomenon impresses me, in that it serves as a means to create (or rather recreate) the collective voice. Ancient epics such as the _Mahabharata_, _Sundiata_, and the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were collectively told and the beautiful stories that result are an accretion of the wisdom of multiple storytellers. Who knows what beautiful works of art, of science, and of culture that we will create by collaborating? We will just have to wait and see...

Charleston poem

2006-11-14T12:33:00.000-08:00

Palimpsest of history—layer over layer—
The heart of Charleston remains

In green and blooming antebellum plantation gardens
On the edge of town
In sweet tea savored on a porch

Walking past an open brick building holding a bazaar

Ebony women stoop on the ground weaving roses from palm leaves; baskets from branches
Singing while they work
Singing as the warm salt sea breeze rolls in off the ocean—rustling the palm branches on the trees

Shops and restaurants housed in pre-revolutionary buildings
Echo with laughter and jazz saxophone blues
As the scent of sea food wafts in from the crab shacks

The sound of life in the city—

Here in Charleston, even time is a time apart—
Charleston, circumscribed and magical, a city all its own

A palimpsest

reach deep, reach deep

Meaning of Myth and Fairytales

2006-08-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Reading _A Return to Love_, the author Marianne Williamson quotes Jung in saying that we must examine the fairytales or myths we were attracted to as a child, for they will tell us about ourselves and our lives as adults. This assertion was interesting to me, so I began my own tale interpretation. What of my favorite fairytale, the _The 12 Dancing Princesses_? That I have yet to figure out, but a unique feature of the story is that it has no one main character--perhaps sparking my interest in sociology.

One interpretation of _Cinderella_ that I read stated that _Cinderella_ is about a girl who has princess-like qualities as her natural state, but in her darkened cinder-sitting state has forgotten her perfection. This is not unlike the Hindu assertion that humans are perfect reflections of God, but have merely forgotten their perfection (Atman=Brahman).

Book review: _Icy Sparks_ by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

2006-08-02T09:18:00.000-07:00

"In rocky soil, I, Icy Sparks, have blossomed. My difference has allowed me to flourish. Without it, life would have been easier, but I would not be me." -p. 307, Icy Sparks, Gwyn Hyman Rubio

These words echo some of my favorite lines in American literature—from Zora Neale Hurston’s comment, “Slavery is the price I paid for civilization and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep” and Langston Hughes’ poem “Theme for English B,” especially the line “I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like/ the same things other folks like who are other races./ So will my page be colored that I write?/ Being me, it will not be white./ But it will be/ a part of you, instructor./ You are white---/ yet a part of me, as I am a part of you./ That's American.” No wonder why I loved this novel!

Icy Sparks is, first and foremost, a book about empathy. From Icy's nurse Maizy Hurley, who wants so desperately to understand her young patients she nearly eats lead paint, to Icy (herself a sufferer of Tourtette's syndrome) attempting to understand her obese friend Miss Emily Tanner, her neighbor Mamie Tillman who has given birth to a dead baby out of wedlock, her gay friend Lane Carlson, and her "frog-eyed" friend Peavy Lawson, this thread runs throughout. If this had been the only message in her work, it would have been enough. But in her swift pen strokes, Rubio not only sketches life in 1950s rural Kentucky but captures a more enduring truth--she captures human nature, both the goodness like the stems and leaves of pokeweed and its poison roots (an image she repeats throughout).

Like the music young Icy sings in a voice so beautiful we can almost hear it, Rubio's song resounds in my soul. Like Icy, everyone has some flaw to hide or overcome; Icy is a heroine, but in the epic sense of also being an everyman; a symbol for us all. Her greatness lies in our ability to share in her trials and empathize with her station. In the end, her story becomes our own.

Icy Sparks is an unforgettable book--one that's hard to put down, and one that's message will never be put out of your heart.

Africa Mulls Dual Citizenship for Slave Kin

2006-07-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

Africa Mulls Dual Citizenship for Slave Kin

The African continent (and its 52 nations) are mulling granting dual citizenship to the kin of former slaves. Such a move, they hope, could act as a fundraiser to help eliminate some of the poverty. A similar system has worked well for India, which grants dual-citizenship to its NRIs. Ideally, this system could work for the African nations, too--just cross your fingers that no dual-citizens decide to actually "return" to Africa as Marcus Garvey suggested. Remember what happened to Liberia? (Hint: the former slaves returned to enslave)

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/91-07202006-686653.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-07-20-citizenship-proposal_x.htm
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060720/ap_on_re_af/africa_citizenship_for_slavery

Rain (poem)

2006-07-20T19:32:00.000-07:00

The furor’s nearer, as the day
The thunder on horizon makes its way
The quiet lingers before the storm—
Menacing gray above the earth;
Clouds borne

If only it would rain—
Water diamonds fall, and the earth relieved
But the tension lingers,
Ominous above

Turning Spam into Art

2006-07-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

Today I read an article about Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu who turns spam into beautiful works of art. He assigns certain words and numbers occurring in spam messages length of petals and leaves, color, etc. This creates a picture from words (or, in another project, music). Ideally, in the future artist-scientists might be able to turn songs into visual art that we can view--actual representations of what is heard, much like the laser light shows of the 1970s.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0720/p16s01-stct.html

www.sq.ro

The One Percent Rule and the Little Red Hen

2006-07-20T13:47:00.000-07:00

Reading an article on the "one percent rule," in the Guardian--an emerging concept that suggests if you get a group of 100 people online only one will create content, 10 will critique it (my husband's favorite part of any project) and the other 89 will just view it--I am strongly reminded of the story of the Little Red hen. Yes, if someone bakes the bread, everyone will eat it--but to get someone to do the work or to help out with it is next to impossible. Even in this age of technology, how true the traditional folklore rings!

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1823959,00.html?gusrc=rss

poem "La Crosse on the River"

2006-04-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

I've been there too many times to count.
70 miles each way.
By the time I was in second grade,
I estimated I'd logged a thousand miles; just there and back,
in short spurts;
as Gallons are lost to the dripping faucet.
What I mean to say is I've been to La Crosse.

Especially in this season,
I miss the red apples
in La Crescent--the kind
of apple you can only buy
at Bauer's Market.
La Crescent is just across the river.

Yet I have placed too many rivers between
time and place
to go back to La Crosse.

Still, every time I hear
that old Credence Clearwater Revival song play, "I never knew..."
'til I hitched a ride on a riverboat queen...
the people on the river are happy to give,"
I know it's true.

Sure, when they used to play it in La Crosse, I'd just laugh.
They played it every other song, it seemed.
Either that or the Tina Turner version.

But La Crosse on the river;
it isn't the same as the one
that's in my mind,
yet just as the river,
it meanders
and everyonce in awhile
flows through to find.

and suddenly I am there;
time and space irrelevant;
life without a care

in La Crosse
on the River;
the one I know

its waterlilies bloom in my mind

Philosophy of Education

2006-04-30T14:36:00.000-07:00

I believe that all students are capable of learning and should be afforded the opportunity to learn; regardless of race, caste, nationality, socioeconomic background, gender, age, sexual orientation, creed, or educational label. I believe that there are no such things as “disabilities,” only obstacles students must learn to work around; I believe that all students can achieve. I believe that immigrant, “at-risk,” and deprived students are a significant resource in every country, and their futures should not be compromised because of a lack of effective education policies.

I believe that students live up to your expectations of them; therefore teachers should expect great things, for students have an infinite capacity for growth and advancement, and nothing is impossible. No matter what point a student starts from, the efforts a student expends on learning are what matter most. As Booker T. Washington wrote in 1901, “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”

I believe in servant-leadership, and see the role of educator as that of water-carrier, standing in a long line of educators passing clay vessels containing knowledge—that most necessary of all things, for which souls thirst—down the generations. I believe that students reflect the attitude and mood of their teacher, and look to their teacher to know how to act. In the worst situations, such as those of school shootings, classrooms with calm teachers also have calm students. Like William Foote Whyte in his Streetcorner Society, I am interested in the ways that a group can shape the behavior and health of an individual—in other words, I am interested in sociology.

I believe that self-discipline is the most important kind of discipline a teacher can instill in her students. I believe that rewards serve only to disinterest students in doing work for its intrinsic reward; therefore the use of rewards actually punishes.

Knowledge

I believe that the process of learning is a process of learning how to discern what is “good.” It is said that the Hindu goddess Saraswati’s animal vehicle, the swan, can drink pure cream out of an ocean of milk. I believe that students must learn basic facts and be exposed to great works of art, literature, music, elegant mathematical proofs, and scientific formulas before they dive into the information ocean to choose what they want to learn. Students should be allowed freedom, but not the freedom to “opt out” of learning necessary skills, since students do not know what awaits them on the other end of education. As teachers, we have traveled the path, and know what is ahead of them; we must therefore have the courage to exert our confidence and guide them.

That which is termed a “fact” is an item of accumulated knowledge that has been tested and re-tested and yet not been disproved through ages and generations. Knowledge that is rapidly changing is only that which is at the frontier; and the frontier of knowledge has always been changing. Facts are the foundational building blocks on which even the changing knowledge is built. It is only after one learns facts that one is able to apply the processes of learning or learning how to learn, and that, like seed to plant, the process of learning cannot be separated from the facts; rather, facts are the origin.

I believe there is value in traditional forms of knowledge; be it the Sundiata epic of Mali, the Iliad or Odyssey, the Mahabharata or Ramayana of India, Gilgamesh, or the New Testament. Epics are encyclopedic, encompassing many types of knowledge—for instance, geographic knowledge, veiled political references, historical knowledge, poetry, philosophy, theology, musical knowledge (as these works were traditionally sung), scientific knowledge of medicinal herbs or traditional healing. I believe that there is a reason why these stories were preserved and handed down, and that even in the age of the internet and computers, there is something embedded within these stories that transcends time, place, gender, or age; and that there is a way in which these stories train the mind and help a person in any endeavor.

In literate societies, literacy is an important skill, and books are like conversations, containing words of wisdom of people from different backgrounds, ages, places, and views, who dialogue with you. In your mind, you can disagree, counter, change in part what the author says; in turn, the book can also change you. Since I feel that the most potent learning comes through dialogue, I use the Socratic method of instruction in my own classes.

Ethics

I want to instill the idea that teaching has moral complexity in my pre-service teachers. As Dan Lortie described the problem, “Teacher preparation programs can give teachers experience in analyzing moral questions not only in general terms (i.e., classes in the philosophy of education) but specific contexts—using teaching cases that are based on a variety of hypothetical situations and events that can serve that purpose; cases have been developed, in fact, that deal specifically with ethical issues” (D.C. Lortie, Schoolteacher, Chicago UP, 2002, p. ix). Therefore, I give students role play situation slips, news articles, and other materials to discuss, in order to expand their minds, problematize their view of the world, and more fully understand others’ opinions—in other words, to empathize.

I believe that confidence and certainty are not the same thing and doubt is a key intellectual tool. Uncertainty is an inescapable feature underlying our world; Werner Heisenberg showed that the more accurately one tries to measure the position of a particle, the less accurately one is able to measure its speed. Such contradictions, ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes must be embraced in order to gain a true perspective of the world.

I believe that if students are “bored” in a class, it is because of their failure to engage with the material. I believe that students only get out as much as they put in to a class, and in the end, every human is responsible for his or her own learning.

I believe that works of fiction are no less truthful than works of non-fiction; that sometimes an author has to throw on the cloak of “fiction” in order to express what is too true and closest to his heart.

I believe that in a world that is increasingly interconnected, it is important to learn about other cultures. Empathy is the ability to imagine oneself in another’s position, and the skill most necessary to the world’s survival. From empathy comes tolerance, understanding, and collaboration.

I believe that teachers “live” for the few students who really learn, in spite of all else.

Book review: _Ka_ by Roberto Calasso

2006-04-30T14:15:00.000-07:00

This poetic novel is an extended prose-poem much like _The Wasteland_ by T.S. Eliot. _Ka_ wraps the epics of the Indian subcontinent into a single unified whole; but by no means is the text meant to be read in a sitting--such beauty and wisdom is intense; reading it in long sittings actually gave me a headache! Nevertheless, this minor "flaw" of forcing the reader to put the text down is an integral part of the reading experience, as Calasso forces the reader to take in the stories piece by piece, like one would in listening to the performance of an epic by a singer-storyteller. One must remember that epics were performed in small pieces, each episode at an appropriate occasion (i.e., a story about a wedding at a wedding). Calasso's _Ka_ is not merely a book, but a simulation of the very experience of listening to and seeing an epic performed!

Commentary on William Julius Wilson's _The Truly Disadvataged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy_

2006-02-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Wilson (1987), writing in the midst of an economic recession, describes conditions of the inner-city poor and minority residents versus those who live in the suburbs. Wilson notes that while liberals see poverty as a problem of context or culture, conservatives see the problem as part of a “culture of poverty” that is absorbed by the individual. Wilson traces the conservative thesis to Lewis’ rather deterministic culture-of-poverty arguments whereby children born in the ghetto absorb the basic values and attitudes of their subculture, which lead to their dependency (p. 13). Wilson contrasts this with liberal arguments by Gans which discredit the conservative thesis (p. 14). In turn, however, Wilson cites liberal arguments, which tend to affiliate poverty, racism, and the “breakdown” of the nuclear family with slavery, but disagrees, citing Gutman’s historical studies which show that the “breakdown” of nuclear families is of relatively recent origin, and that the two-parent family was the “norm” up to World War II (p. 64). Indeed, Wilson takes a balanced approach, sketching both arguments and viewpoints without setting up a straw man, as so many authors might be apt to do, but contradicts both theses by offering his own explanation, noting that he believes the key theoretical concept is not “culture of poverty,” but “social isolation” (p. 61).
Wilson asserts that problems of unemployment, female-headed households (which tend to be economically poorer than male-headed households), school dropouts, violent crime, and teenage pregnancies are compounded by concentration—for while the jobs move to the suburbs, government housing projects move even more disadvantaged people into the inner city (p. 42). Not only are urban minorities more vulnerable to structural economic changes, such as a shift from goods- to service-based economy, but residing in the ghetto isolates people from the job network system that permeates other neighborhoods (p. 39, 57). In fact, people residing in poor neighborhoods seldom have contact with friends or family in other parts of the city or suburbs (p. 60). Basic institutions such as churches, stores, and schools cannot remain viable when the middle and working classes leave the ghetto. This causes a vicious cycle, because teachers become frustrated, as students do not learn (p. 56-57).
Unfortunately, Wilson also argues that the problems of the truly disadvantaged (his term for those who both belong to an ethnic or racial minority and the socioeconomic underclass—as a subgroup separate from the racial minorities liberals commonly term “disadvantaged” regardless of socioeconomic class), paradoxically stem from women’s empowerment. Wilson writes, “Feminism as a social and cultural movement may have directly influenced the marriage decisions of women; it may also have indirectly affected these decisions through its role in women’s more active participation in the labor market” (p. 77). This apparently shifts the blame from bad social policy planning or the “culture of poverty” to a new scapegoat—women. By entering the labor force, women take jobs away from men, which in turn shrinks the size of the “male marriageable pool” of men (i.e., employed men—which is a rather old-fashioned definition, and implies that women marry for the “rational” reason of being economically supported, rather than the “irrational” reason of love, without economic support, such as I did), contributing to out-of-wedlock births, and an increase in female-headed households (p. 95-96). Even more, “women’s increasing employment makes marital breakup financially more viable than in the past” (p. 77). Such a statement almost implies that many women are waiting to get divorced—just as soon as they can save up a little money. Wilson seemingly does not attribute these breakups to spousal abuse, which might contribute to a woman’s desire for divorce, or any factors other than a woman’s gaining employment. Wilson also noted that African-American women work in greater numbers than white women, and that the African-American men are not only jobless, but have high mortality and incarceration rates, making the “marriage market” even smaller for African-American females (p. 83). Put in this context, Wilson makes it seem like African-American women cause the male joblessness, and contribute to their own problem of a shrinking “marriage market.” Wilson does not examine whether perhaps the actual number of African-American females increased in proportion to the number of males (i.e., birthrate ratio of females to males). This would suggest a gender imbalance caused not just by mortality, incarceration, and unemployment rates (which are social factors), but a biological gender imbalance (which is a natural or environmental factor). Biologically, more females tend to be born in instable times (since male fetuses tend to miscarry). This question would be interesting to explore in greater depth.
While I was disturbed by Wilson’s uncritical attribution of social problems to women (who are “truly disadvantaged” by his scapegoating), I was impressed by some of the issues Wilson anticipated. For instance, Wilson implied that whichever ethnic group becomes concentrated in an urban area then becomes affiliated with negative stereotypes about inner-city dwellers, and is therefore the ethnic group is discriminated against even more. As the African-American population had a net outmigration from the central cities, the Hispanic population moved in (p. 34-35). In Timmonsville, South Carolina, where my Mom currently teaches, the Hispanic students are teased much more than the African-American students. Until I read Wilson’s argument, this phenomenon had remained a quandary to me. In addition, Wilson also anticipated the alternative agenda of “new-style workfare,” which was later implemented by people such as former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson (p. 159). I am intrigued by what Wilson’s proposal for an essentially non-means tested, universalized New Deal-style policy might look like if implemented today, and what kinds of WPA projects people might be put to work on for the common good, recalling the buildings, bridges, murals, posters, and folklore collections created in the past.

Towards a Hegelian Dialectical Education Theory

2006-01-15T19:08:00.000-08:00

The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain the conflicting goals, pedagogical methods, and student problems within US schools. Since the US has a highly decentralized education system in contrast to many other parts of the world, its continuation likely an attempt to avoid the political and racial struggles that would ensue with a nationalized curriculum or set of textbooks, we are left with a school system largely undefined. Instead, we must rely on theory to guide us, but there are many ways to stasis, and few ways that point to progress.
I posit three types of theoretical structures of educational dialogue: Labaree’s three-point model, which represents the purposes of schooling, Friere’s one-point model, which represents pedagogical practices as they pertain to adult literacy, and a Hegelian dialectical two-point model that represents pedagogical practices as they are applied to K-12 schooling. The two-point model is arguably the dominant model in education practice, and the single model that allows for rapid progress. Theories are inextricable from practice, yet because theories of education prove difficult to directly implement in practice and are mediated, and therefore transformed in the process of interpretation, I offer snapshots of plural implementations of both Progressivist theory and “core knowledge” theory in practice.
Just as there are numerous ways for the educational system to fail, there are numerous ways for students to fail. Undoubtedly, the curricular confusion is linked to student achievement. I therefore discuss two basic types of “at-risk” students and offer the probable cause of, and some possible pedagogical solutions for, their problems. I then go on to discuss how Foucault and Bowles and Gintis might critique my theory.

Labaree’s Three-Point Model
Labaree’s model represents the purposes of schooling. In describing the conflicting goals of education, Labaree’s (1997) model delineates three goals of education: democratic efficiency, social efficiency, and social mobility. While each of these goals have been discussed by other authors previously, Labaree is unique in that he places the three goals in single a model and makes the assertion that they tend to stay in an equilibrium—where the tensions pull society in one direction, the other two goals pull society back. Where the three goals differ, the tension resulting from their conflict negates progress. Labaree’s view of education seems to reproduce the check-and-balance triangle of the three branches of US government: congress, senate, and judicial. Because the different goals check one another, this view is predominantly one of stasis. In some aspects, stasis is beneficial because it represents continuity. Education, like religion, is fundamentally conservative, in that certain traditions and bits of knowledge must be preserved and passed down to future generations. However, a static model cannot quickly adapt to a society’s rapidly changing technologies, and may have the tendency to preserve not only the gems of traditional wisdom, but the traditional biases as well.

Freire’s One-Point Model
Not all static models have three points in a check-and-balance arrangement. Freire’s model—namely as it has been applied to creating literacy groups that promote dialogue and critical literacy, by empowering the oppressed to read the world (specifically what’s going on behind the scenes) and the word— seems to be the dominant paradigm in adult literacy. Unfortunately, in the field of adult literacy, an alternative model to critical pedagogy has yet to be posed. Ideology, says Douglas Kellner (1978), has a “life cycle.” While it begins as an “-ism,” a new perspective on socio-political concerns, it later becomes “hegemonic” when its proponents become so concerned with its preservation that they become unreflexive and fail to recognize its limitations or think differently, then becoming static. Criticality presumes reflection on one’s assumptions, yet criticality requires dialogue with others since it is not often that we can see the mote in our own eye. It is ironic that “critical pedagogy” has become un-critical through rising to the hegemonic heights which the field of literacy enshrines it in, leaving it unquestioned (and thus no longer critical). I believe that there must be at least two models posed, in order to dialogue with one another, and balance and develop the perspectives. To have a single model (as well as to have a check-and-balance model) is to stem development.

Hegelian Dialogical (Two-Point) Model
I believe that although a field may have a dominant paradigm, there also needs to be a minority voice to propel the field forward. To stem progress is to close the door on hope itself. To have two contrasting viewpoints—two opposing points, both true, on a wider circle—is part of a Hegelian dialectic that is necessary for progress. Each argument in dialogue both checks the opposite viewpoint and informs or enriches it. By arguing with a critic, a stronger position is developed. Hegel’s dialectic is postmodernism in the truest sense of the term, in that it allows for multiple hermeneutics on the world of the circle. While the two-point model also has the potential for stasis, by two opposing points negating progress if the distance each point travels in an opposite direction is equal; or by the distance traveled in the “wrong” direction being greater than that traveled in the “right” direction, thus causing regression rather than progress, I believe the dialectical model is the only model that has the potential for progress at all.

Certainly, the two-point system has its drawbacks in practice. I have come to imagine it as a person with two hands, each of them pointing in an opposite direction, while the person instructs us to “go this way,” much like the mad logic found in Alice in Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As a teacher, I was frustrated by being told to simultaneously “keep the class in order,” but not to discipline any students, and “make sure the students learn,” but not to assign any homework. I found it difficult to find a balance between the two extremes and impossible to fully follow both paths at once. As Deborah Meier has written, “They [the public schools] are under heavy attack not only for failing to teach basic skills and “higher-order” thinking, but also for failing to teach any specific social or moral values and for teaching too many of them” (Meier, 1995, p. 67).
But as frustrating as the fingers pointing both ways are, at least it is a dialogical system, open to possibilities for progress. To have the hope for progress is freedom.
Deeply intertwined with the two-point system is the argument between pedagogical practices in K-12 schooling—an argument between Progressivism versus “Core Knowledge.”
Around the 1920s, Dewey propounded a method of hands-on, project-based, child-centered learning, focusing on individualized rather than whole-class instruction whereby lessons are built off of students’ interests and content is made “relevant.” Influenced by Romantic notions of the child, Progressivism concentrates on self-esteem, creativity, happiness, and other intangibles rather than more empirical outcomes. Central to Progressivism is the notion that “study skills” and “higher-order thinking skills” can be acquired in the absence of direct instruction in content knowledge, since learning is a “natural” process. The process of learning, rather than the content, is therefore emphasized. This rosy picture must be complicated, however, by the fact that there are two types of Progressivism: Dewey-an Progressivism and Administrative Progressivism.
Dewey-an Progressivism is heavily theoretical, and therefore difficult to implement, since it needs to be interpreted before being practiced. As a result, even Dewey-an schools take many different forms. Indeed, “building serious classroom work around the interest and experience of students and teachers was difficult and demanding. Few of the reformers explained how to do it. John Dewey confessed, after a try at running a school, that he knew much less about it than he had thought” (Powell, Farrar, & Cohen, 1985, p. 269).
On the other hand, Administrative Progressivism came about as an application of principles of scientific management of the workplace, which were first introduced in the field of engineering by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1895 (Tozer, Violas, & Senese, 1995). As a response to the huge influx of the “new wave” of immigrants from Italy, Greece, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, and rural America, whose children now filled the crowded big city schools, measures of cost-cutting, efficiency, and management were introduced. The purpose of scientific management was not just to manage the schools, but to manage the students who would become workers—and to fit them for their jobs.
For a long time, Progressivism seemed the answer to our pedagogical problems because it struck a balance between social efficiency goals and academics. Those espousing rugged individualism such as H.D. Thoreau, Emerson, and Mark Twain (a.k.a., Samuel Langhorne Clemens) who had been influenced by the previous generation that witnessed the Revolutionary War, would have embraced Progressivism for its adaptation of school to the individual, its focus on the process of learning rather than the content, and its Romantic view of the child. Thoreau would have appreciated the fact that Progressive educators did not beat children for discipline, while Twain would have appreciated the emphasis on individuality. Arguably, anti-intellectualism is also a strong strand within our culture (for instance, with the frontiersmen) which probably found its way into some of the Progressivist schools (which emphasized process over content), if unintentionally.
Capitalists loved Progressivism because it helped train their workers not only in the tasks they would need to carry out, but in the attitudes they needed to hold in order to be “good workers.” Capitalists also hoped that if their workers were trained in obedience from an early age, many of the strikes that rocked the era might be avoided. Perhaps influenced by the capitalists, some schools even began to advertise education as a technical preparation for economic success, a notion that flourished during the 1890s (Cohen & Neufeld, 1981, p. 71). Administrative Progressivism directly contrasted Dewey-an Progressivism insofar as Dewey noted in Democracy and Education that Plato defined the slave as one who accepts the purposes which control his conduct from another (Dewey, 1916, p.85). Administrative Progressivism set out to control the conduct of its students in order to “train” them. Such training, conversely, could be viewed as benefiting society in that workers contribute to the productivity of the national economy.
Just as there are many interpretations of Progressivism, there are many forms that Progressivist schools can take. Under the leadership of William Wirt, Gary, Indiana (a city founded in 1906 by the US Steel Corporation to house its workers), became a flagship Progressivist school district while teaching about farm animals and industrial job tasks. For the first time, students even changed classes at the bell, rotating between academic instruction and play periods—an innovation that allowed the school to house more students, since no space was wasted (Rury, 2005). The Gary plan was praised by both Dewey (who had been a teacher of Wirt’s) and the Administrative Progressives.
The Progressivism that was practiced at the magnet school I attended for elementary in the late 1980s and early 90s was far different. As Progressivism was practiced at Lincoln at Mann, students were treated as equals and called teachers by their first names, were allowed to choose which of Gardner’s multiple intelligences they had or which ones they wanted to develop during the year (i.e., logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, visual-spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, etc.). Classes were grade combined (i.e., 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, although some students stayed through 8th grade spending time with an individual tutor at the school) and which teacher we received was determined by which multiple intelligence we wanted to develop; all of the students within a particular classroom opted to learn through or develop the same specific intelligence. We were encouraged at conferences to set goals for the quarter, semester, and year marks. These goals later had to be translated into projects; because it was my goal to be an astronaut when I grew up, I made the mistake in kindergarten of saying I would build an airplane that I would fly to school in by the end of the year. Since the school’s motto was “self-esteem, we’ve got it,” no one told me that it might not be possible. Students graded themselves on mastery of different skills on an M* (mastery plus), M (mastered), P (partial), N/A scale prior to the teacher’s grading us on those same skills on the same report card. Since we were treated as equals, we were allowed to “opt out” of “learning activities” we were not interested in; I “opted out” of multiplication in the third grade even though I did not know what I did not know. Conversely, we were also allowed to take skills as high as we wanted to, so I ended up reading Macbeth in third grade. While the program worked out for me (despite my problem with multiplication), self-motivation was a problem for some, and many students had trouble adjusting once outside of the school. Several members of the Lincoln at Mann parental board (which was instrumental in deciding who would be accepted into the school, which students would be removed, and what curricular materials would be used), wanted to extend the school beyond K-8 to include high school, but were unsuccessful in their bid. While Central Park East did not implement Progressivism in quite the same way that Lincoln at Mann did, it seems to me that Meier’s Central Park East Elementary school probably extended into the secondary level because their students weren’t adjusting well to school outside of Central Park East. Nevertheless, the solution of extending a student’s years in the same environment only delays the problem rather than eliminating it.
Every type of pedagogy works for some students, and it continues to be practiced on the basis of citing individual cases where it has worked. I believe that in the cases where Progressivism has worked, the individual students have had a strong basis in factual knowledge to build off of before they ever got to school. I suspect that the students who Progressivism works for would learn just as easily, and maybe learn more, in a different setting than Progressive pedagogy provides. For the majority of other students, to try and implement “higher order” thinking skills without implementing (in some way or another) the basic skills is like trying to build a house starting with the roof rather than the foundation; you never do end up with the result you want to get.
While Progressivists have long insisted that, “everything’s changing so quickly,” that they “can’t possibly know what skills will be needed in the future,” and believe they must teach “higher order” thinking skills to provide students with the basis of “learning how to learn,” I see this assertion as a cop-out. Anyone can read the news, given that they have a few basic skills, and a conceptual framework built in their mind to place the new ideas in context. One does not automatically have that framework—it gets built up by learning facts and putting them together. No matter how fast things change, the core essentials of knowledge do not; it’s only the frontiers of any field are changing. The facts are the same established ones which have been tested again and again for generations and have not been disproved despite rigorous testing; these essentials are the same things one’s great-great-granddaddy might have learned in school, and they are just as relevant today. These basic facts are the bricks that lay the foundation for whatever fantastic roofing the world may invent later.
Hirsch takes a similar position. Like Freire, Hirsch’s pedagogical method is based off of the field of literacy. But instead of asserting that you need to read the word in order to be able to read the world [and what’s going on behind the scenes]—namely to break free of it, Hirsch inverts Freire and says that in order to read the word, you need to be able to read the [world] culture and understand the allusions—namely by being immersed in the culture. In Cultural Literacy (1988), Hirsch says that in order for a student to be prepared to live within the world, he or she must learn the basic bits of information that others allude to. These bits of information are “core knowledge”—the building blocks that serve as a foundation and conceptual framework.
In Hirsch’s Core Knowledge schools, the curriculum includes many “traditional” pre-Progressive elements such as reading Greco-Roman mythology in the elementary years and memorizing facts. Hirsch believes that through having a coherent, standard, and sequenced curriculum, learning gaps caused by student mobility can be decreased. Further, he believes a sense of community (such as the one Meier touts in her book, claiming it to be the sole province of Progressivism) can be built through parents working with their children. In his What Your __ Grader Needs to Know series, Hirsch includes traditional tales, songs, and lessons in art, history, geography, math, and science for parents to do with their children.
Hirsch’s “core knowledge” method is very similar to the method of teaching I settled into. Teaching in my own school in Indiana—a “one-room style” school in Indianapolis —covering a course subject that was supposed to be algebra, I soon found that not only my 6th grader could not understand why “3x=18” by any method shown, but my 11th graders could not understand it either. It was not a problem with the variable; they understood that “x” substituted for some number. The problem was multiplication itself. They sometimes guessed, sometimes tried to count out the answer on their fingers, and sometimes used rhymes they learned or methods they created for multiplication which did not usually work. I ended up taking them back to revisit multiplication—attempting to make it interesting through games (whole class tic-tac-toe, since it was initially very difficult for the entire class to get three or more answers right; multiplication bingo), projects (making Napier’s bones, illustrating booklets for younger siblings), and tricks with fingers (with the 9’s, you can spread your two hands out, and count from the left; for 9x3, you count down 3 fingers, and you can see that 2_7 or 27 is left). I introduced these activities at the beginning of class; once the students were interested in multiplication, we launched into memorizing the tables through group recitation out loud (I used whole class instruction), drawing multiplication tables, practicing flash cards in pairs, and working out multiplication problems in their notebooks. While it took several weeks before the students learned how to multiply (I suspect it took them longer because they now had wrong methods to un-learn), building off of the basis of multiplication, and division—which they practically breezed through after learning how to multiply, I was able to bring them back up to algebra by the quarter mark.
If I had claimed to teach the students “higher order” thinking skills, I doubt I would have bothered to teach the multiplication tables, least of all through such shockingly traditional methods—like memorization, recitation, and whole group instruction. But if I had not done so, my students would have been completely lost in algebra. Traditional methods are often caricatured as “dull,” but in the shouting hours of multiplication recitation that took place in my classroom nothing could have been further from the truth. The students were not only engaged, but excited to be learning a skill that had eluded them for so long.
Like those who use terminological polarization in the culture war, Progressivists typically use rhetorical pairings like “traditional vs. modern,” “merely verbal vs. hands on,” “premature vs. developmentally appropriate,” “fragmented vs. integrated,” “boring vs. interesting,” “lockstep vs. individualized” (Hirsch, 1996, p. 8). I believe that the delineation is artificial. Just as there can’t be a plant without a seed to start from, the process of learning cannot begin sans content but needs something to build from.
There may be nothing “natural” about certain subjects, like learning how to read; the alphabet is arbitrary and imposed. It differs from culture to culture (if it were natural, it would be the same, and we would all speak the same language). Ancient castes of scribes in Jewish, Hindu, and Egyptian cultures were revered for their knowledge of writing, since few could read or write. The process of learning something as arbitrary as the alphabet or multiplication tables is not natural because the content itself is not natural. That is not to say that learning must be dull where it can be made “fun,” but learning the content must take precedent over the entertainment value that embellishes the topic. As Gramsci wrote, “The new concept of schooling is in its romantic phase, in which the replacement of “mechanical” by “natural” methods has become unhealthily exaggerated… Previously pupils at least acquired a certain baggage of concrete facts. Now there will no longer be any baggage to put in order” (Hirsch, 1996, p. 6).
This argument between Progressivism and Traditionalism is not new; it has been going on a long time in education. The argument between the two may be exemplified by the dissonance between the Committee of Ten report and the Cardinal Principles report.
In 1893, Harvard President Charles Eliot headed an NEA panel called the Committee of Ten, which argued for both greater quality and greater flexibility in high school education. While the panel supported offering physics, chemistry, and French (in addition to more classical subjects), it disapproved of bookkeeping and clerical studies. Those on the panel argued (much like Hirsch) for a standardized national curriculum (Powell, Farrar, & Cohen, 1985, p. 240-41). Both those in favor of classical studies and those advocating “practical” studies were outraged; in the end, the panel’s reasonable via media failed.
In 1918, the NEA released a new report: the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education which insisted that education was democratic, and should help every individual “find his place in society” by teaching him/her the skills a citizen should know. These skills included worthy home membership, vocation, citizenship, good health, and various academic processes including reading, writing, math computations, and oral and written expression (Powell, Farrar, & Cohen, 1985, p. 256). Both Administrative Progressives, who implemented vocational training, and Dewey-an Progressives, who stressed the processes of learning (versus the content) and who later implemented extracurricular activities were pleased. This report was widely heralded and even considered the “Bible” of school reformers.
Although the argument is ongoing, the way I see it, we have given Progressivism a long enough “test drive” to know that this educational vehicle does not work. Indeed, we have been trying to make Progressivism work since the 1900’s. Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By Einstein’s definition, then, to continue trying to make Progressivism work, is insane.

Many Paths to Student Failure
Just as there are many theoretical paths to stasis, there are many actions that lead to student failure. The way to succeed in school, or to have school succeed the student in its role of educating one for future productivity, success, and happiness (in whatever terms it may be defined) is a very narrow one; the ways for school and student to fail are numerous. “At-risk” students may have been exposed to risk factors such as poverty, young, single, or low-educational status parents, abuse and neglect, dangerous neighborhoods, or homelessness, alienation, or inadequate educational experiences. Of course, students may have been exposed to several of these risk factors, creating a cumulative risk.
“At-risk” students tend to fall into two types: first, those who are “at-risk” due low achievement and second, those who have been exposed to inadequate educational experiences (Pellino, K.M., 2005).
“At-risk” Students, Type One
At-risk students who have “low achievement” or “inadequate skill level” are the students we typically picture when the term “at-risk” is used. It is highly likely that these “at-risk” students originate from a lower-class background.
In Bourdieu’s parsimonious view, schooling is an exercise in stratification of society, whereby wealthy parents pass down “cultural capital” to their children. The topics that teachers teach in schools are those that wealthy parents have passed down to their children through osmosis, by exposure to the middle class environment; for instance, the skill of “sequencing” is a product of orderliness, whereas children from a lower class environment filled with chaos may be confused by the concept of “sequencing.”
The way that I see it, both wealthy and lower class people have skills; the skills that they have just happen to be different sets of skills, and the skills that the wealthy hold happen to be more highly valued because the wealthy are in a hegemonic position (as Gramsci termed it).
For instance, say Pat Johnson comes from a lower-class home. He does not do very well in school, but he knows how to improvise with recipes, cooking dinner using government food which varies from month to month, how to revise leftovers, how to handle money and use coupons, how to navigate a drug-infested area and not get hurt, how to sew his own clothes or cut used clothes down to size, how to entertain himself by storytelling or singing, how to avoid getting hit by an abusive parent, how to decorate a home with thrift store findings, how to use a bucket as a dustpan, how to flatten a penny on the train tracks as a toy, and how to keep from getting beaten up by one’s peers by acting “cool” and using different linguistics.
In contrast, Susan Smith comes from a wealthy background and knows how to read and negotiate dense contracts, invest money (in cd’s, banks, the stock market, and venture capitalism), and she knows which name brands are “trendy.” She knows how to golf, play tennis, and ski, is versed in speaking French, and plays the piano, harp, and flute. She knows how to direct a caterer or a housekeeper to do work, and she knows how to keep a household neat and orderly using special containers, such as from the Container Store. Since she has manners, she knows the etiquette for parties, soirees, and other occasions. Because the upper middle class are in a hegemonic position, her skills are valued more than Pat’s, and are tested in document reading on exams, sequencing, math problems on investments and interest, French quizzes, and her use of what Delpit terms “edited” English. Pat may be labeled “at-risk” because his “skills” [namely the skills that the school values] are not up to par, while Susan, who is really no “smarter” than Pat may receive accolades.
Students like Pat may benefit from direct instruction. Lisa Delpit says that students who do not come to school with “cultural capital” need the hidden rules made explicit through direct instruction, since schools are based on the culture of the upper and middle classes.
In contrast to Freire, who called for a change of both methods and content—new content to celebrate the culture of the oppressed and new methods to ensure resistance and intellectual independence, Delpit (similar to Hirsch and Gramsci before her) argues that in order for the oppressed classes and races to succeed, the oppressed class should master the traditional tools of power and authority (Hirsch, 1996, p. 7).

“At-Risk” Students, Type Two
“At-risk” students who have received inadequate or inappropriate educational experiences are not the students who are usually thought of when the term “at-risk” is used. These students may have been gifted and talented students who became “at-risk” due to tuning out in class, being “turned off” to educational studies, and becoming alienated from lack of challenge. These students may also have been bullied by classmates or peers for being “different.”
If gifted and talented students are placed within a regular classroom, they may be exposed to an inappropriate level of instruction as the result of a teacher’s use of whole-class instruction (such as Hirsch propounds) after the 1975 IDEA act, which stretched the variety of student levels within an individual classroom. In this case, “core knowledge” pedagogy may not be the best solution for a student; on the other hand, Progressivism tends to advocate for the wide variety of students to be broadened even further. Because social promotion often does not encourage the “skipping” of grades, gifted and talented students who are bored have more time to get into trouble, and may end up being labeled “at-risk.” Compounding these problems, bright students from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds may be more likely to get tracked into lower skill level classes than non-minorities.
Both students at the low end and high end of the spectrum seem to have problems and wear the “at-risk” label much more frequently than middle-level students. By failing to meet the needs of students at the lower end and at the higher end, aiming only for the middle, instructional practices actually produce “at-risk” students.
While the student who becomes “at-risk” suffers because of lost educational opportunities, society suffers as well since society is made up of individuals, and the loss to one is a loss to all. Other countries, ironically, have done better both in terms of equality and achievement. I believe that America can do better.

Foucault’s View of My Theory
Foucault would disagree with my assessment of things. First, he would find fault with basing a theory on Hegelian dialectic. In an interview, he said that “ ‘Dialectic’ is a way of evading the always open and hazardous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton.” (Rabinow, 1984, p. 57). For him, history is a matter of struggle, represented by the image of war, and change can only come through a break with tradition (Rabinow, 1984, p.54, 65). Truth does not stand in opposition to “un-truth,” or reason in contrast to “non-reason,” but is created within discourses which are themselves neither true nor false (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, p. 210). Truth is created by a regime, and there are therefore many versions of truth. Foucault might argue that my assessment is merely a version of truth (or “regime”), and attack my assertion that the circle of Hegel’s dialectic could include as authoritative a point as Hirsch’s, given that postmodernism rejects authoritative “experts” such as Hirsch might be deemed (assuming, of course, that Foucault believes Hegelian dialectic to be postmodern, as Clive Beck posits, although Hegel wrote and lived within the modern era).
Pedagogies likewise operate as regimes of truth. For Foucault, power is exercised rather than possessed, so there are neither any inherently liberating or repressive pedagogical practices (Gore, 1994, p. 233). While Hirsch’s “core knowledge” would be no more liberating than Dewey’s Progressivism in theory, Foucault might assert that the Progressivist regime was once liberating because it represented a paradigmatic shift, and that “core knowledge” is currently liberating insofar as it represents a break with the dominant paradigm of Progressivism. In essence, Foucault would say that no liberation is permanent, and as soon as something becomes dominant, the struggle for liberation must begin again.
Bowles and Gintis’ Critique
Bowles and Gintis, using their social reproduction theory, would claim that the education system—both in Progressivism (particularly as manifested in Administrative Progressivism) and “core knowledge” pedagogies—legitimates economic inequality by providing a pseudo-meritocratic mechanism for assigning individuals to economic positions. The poor are concentrated in schools with repressive, chaotic, and arbitrary internal order mirroring the characteristics of their inferior job situations (Bowles & Gintis, 1976, p.132). Education is a mere tool of the economic order; the purpose of education being to initiate students into the economic system; whereas some eras have been better at that indoctrination than others, some pedagogies have been more effective in that indoctrination than others. Because those in a hegemonic position set curricular standards, any “meritocracy” is illusory. Similarly, race and social distinctions are merely a part of the upper class’ ploy to divide and conquer the subordinate classes. Because the elites control the economic order, and therefore also control its handmaiden, education, as soon as economically disadvantaged students began to learn the same curriculum as the elites, the way that elites measure “merit” would shift. Since meritocracy is just a construct of the elites, there is no way to beat them at their own game—the rules would be rewritten. Bowles and Gintis would argue that Hirsch, Delpit, and I are under a delusion that we could change the social order permanently—especially in thinking that we could change it from the outside.

References

Beck, C. (1993). Postmodernism, Pedagogy, and Philosophy of Education. 2. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Education, Inequality, and Meritocracy. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. NY: Basic Books. 132.
Cohen, D.K., & Neufeld, B. (1981). The Failure of High Schools and the Progress of Education. Daedalus, 110. 71.
Cusick, P.A. (1983). The Egalitarian Ideal and the American High School. NY: Longman.
Delpit, L. (1988). The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other Peoples’ Children. Harvard Educational Review, 58 (3), 280-297.
Dewey, J. (1916). The Democratic Conception in Education. Democracy and Education. NY: Macmillan. 85.
Dreyfus, H.L., & Rabinow, P. (1982). Afterword: The Subject and Power. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: Chicago UP. 210.
Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. NY: Continuum.
Gore, J.M. (1994). Enticing Challenges: An Introduction to Foucault and Educational Discourses. 233.
Hirsch, E.D. (1988). Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. NY: Vintage Books.
Hirsch, E.D. (1996). The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them. NY: Doubleday. 6-8.
Hirsch, E.D. (1991). What Your First Grader Needs to Know. NY: Delta.
Kellner, D. (1978).
Labaree, D.F. (1997). Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34 (1), 39-81.
Levine, D., et al., Teachers, Culture, and Power: An Interview with Lisa Delpit. Rethinking Schools: An Agenda for Change. Leading Reformers Speak Out. NY: New Press. 136-47.
Meier, D. (1995). The Power of Their Ideas. Boston: Beacon Press. 67.
Pellino, K.M. (2005). The Effects of Poverty on Teaching and Learning. Retrieved December 5, 2005 from the World Wide Web: http://wwww.teach-nology.com/tutorials/teaching/poverty/print.htm
Powell, A.G., Farrrar, E., & Cohen, D.K. (1985). The Shopping Mall High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 240-269.
Rabinow, P. (Ed.). (1984). Truth and Power. The Foucault Reader. NY: Pantheon Books. 54-65.
Rury, J.L. (2005). Education and Social Change. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Tozer, S.E., Violas, P.C., & Senese, G.B. (1995). Social Diversity and Differentiated Schooling: The Progressive Era. School and Society: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1995. 85-124.

Teaching’s Position within Social Structures

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Realizing the stratification and specialization that society needs to function as a body according to structuralist theory, schools act as a mechanism for transforming individual stem cells [uneducated elementary students] into cells serving specialized functions [i.e., leader, professor, laborer]—heart cells, brain cells, and muscle tissue. In Social Class and School Knowledge, Anyon (1981) describes four socioeconomic classes of students—working class, middle class, affluent professional class (or “educated” class), and the executive elite class—and the differing types of education that students received in order to transform them from stem cell into specialized cell. The types of education students received differed dramatically—especially for a nation that claims to offer equal opportunity to all.
It should be no surprise, given that students receive dramatically different educations, that there is a special “type” of person who becomes a teacher. In our society, occupations are picked by ascriptive qualities (social characteristics visible at birth) and personal choice from among the paths one is allowed to take (Lortie, 1975, p. 25). Teaching tends to be a conservative profession in that it values tradition and continuity. “One might, of course, enter teaching to change it; but as we shall see later, it is difficult to find members of the occupation who so describe their entry” (Lortie, 1975, p. 29).
Combining Lortie’s observation that few radicals enter the profession of teaching to change it and Anyon’s observation that people from certain backgrounds—through the process of specialization via education—end up with certain attributes, I am led to believe that the majority of teachers come from the middle class. Arguably, students are drawn to the profession of teaching in proportion to the degree with which they are able to identify with the background of their teachers.
While some teachers may derive from a working class background, teaching has a tendency to appeal to those who had a good experience in school; this fact alone may discourage many from the working class to enter the profession—given the baggage they carry from inadequate or poor educational experiences and bad memories from school days. Even out of those who have fonder memories of school, many are prevented from entering the occupation due to lack of skills, college education, or credentials that few from a working class background are able to attain. By allowing a token number of working class individuals to become teachers, the Horatio Alger myth of “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps” is allowed to continue, while encouraging other members of the working class to “toe the line,” in hopes that their good behavior might have its reward. It is no mistake that one of the professions promising the working class upward mobility is a conservative one—for society needs the working class to be obedient and rule-abiding—using the reward of an individual with a conservative job as symbolic encouragement for the obedience of others. Those who loved school and feel that entering the profession is a “reward” or a step up the social ladder are unlikely to want to change the system that provided them with their position, leading to its continuity.
In the working class schools Anyon observed, teachers were predominantly young, single, male, and from the state teachers college. It is important to note that “a significant proportion of men who teach come from homes marked by economic insecurity and low social status” (Lortie, 1975, p. 30). In other words, students attending working class schools are trained to be working class people by individuals originating from the working class—although most of the working class teachers originally came from a better neighborhood than those which they eventually taught in.
In the middle class schools Anyon observed, approximately 1/3 of the teachers grew up in the neighborhood, most graduated from a local state teachers college, and the majority were females married to men with middle-class careers. Since these teachers came from such similar backgrounds as their students, perhaps it made it easier for students to identify with their teachers, imagining themselves in the role teachers—thus perpetuating the middle class dominance of this profession.
In the affluent professional school Anyon observed, the majority of teachers were female and married to professionals, had originally derived from middle-class or upper-middle class backgrounds, and grew up throughout the state. These students were apparently less likely to see themselves as teachers, due to there being less of an alignment between their backgrounds and those of their teachers—especially when compared to the match between middle class students’ and teachers’ backgrounds. It also seems unlikely that individuals receiving an education that emphasizes questioning, creativity, and independent thinking would be attracted to a profession that values tradition, continuity, and routine work. Teaching is not only unlikely to attract those who want to taste new experiences and tackle novel challenges, but is likely to drive out any individual who enters the profession standing against the strong community pressures that perpetuate “norms” and “standards.”
In the executive elite school that Anyon observed, most teachers were females married to professionals, residing in the professional section of town. Many came from middle- and upper-middle class backgrounds, but considered themselves of a lower social status then their students. It should be no surprise, given that such teachers are of a lower social status, that they bring a very different political perspective to class discussions, making it unlikely for students to closely identify with them—instead viewing them as “other.” Teaching is therefore unlikely to appeal to those of an executive elite background, who have been trained to plan, order, and organize society. An individual of executive elite origins attracted to the field of education might instead opt to become an administrator rather than a teacher.

The Field of Literacy

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A concern for literacy has been widely heralded. Statistics proclaim dire warnings: “Some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension. About 13% of all 17-year-olds in the US can be considered functionally illiterate. Functional illiteracy among minority youth may run as high as 40%” (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 2). Seeing such statistics and headlines, one assumes that our methods of instruction are failing, and that teachers today are doing a worse job educating students than teachers in the past. In truth, there was no “golden age” of education. “In 1951, the Los Angeles Public schools’ associate superintendent tested the basic skills and fundamental knowledge of the district’s children. According to Time Magazine (“Failure in Los Angeles, 1951), when the teachers and parents got to look at the results, they ‘yelped with pained surprise.’ Among the 11th graders, 3 percent could not tell time, 4 percent did not know what letter preceded “M” in the alphabet, and 14 percent could not calculate 50 percent of 36” (Sedlak, Wheeler, Pullin, & Cusick, 1986, p. 18).
Nevertheless, such concern for literacy is of relatively recent origin. In ancient times, castes of scribes in Egypt, Israel, and India were highly respected since only a few people knew how to read and write. St. Augustine in his Confessions depicts people reading out loud; this was a common practice so that those who were illiterate could receive the information by “listening in” or “eavesdropping” if they wanted to. It was not until the late 19th century that the ability to read silently and understand an unfamiliar text became the goal of mass education. Prior to this time, literate individuals were those who could declaim familiar texts aloud. Getting new meaning from texts—in fact, getting any meaning from texts—was not the goal of reading instruction even throughout much of the 19th century (Cohen & Neufeld, 1981, p.81). While universities began offering reading improvement courses around the late 19th century—the most notable being the University of Michigan (1852), Iowa State (1870), Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (1902), enrollment in such courses did not expand until the 1970s when colleges began granting academic credit for these courses. Nevertheless, despite granting credit, as late as 1982, the effectiveness of college-level reading programs had not been systematically evaluated (Anderson, 1982).
Even though the field of literacy is a relatively recent development, the battle lines have already been drawn. Polemics and battles abound: phonics versus whole language, decoding versus comprehension, reading to comprehend versus reading to do, schema theory versus Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, approaches to reading based on behaviorism as versus constructivism, pedagogical approaches based on “core knowledge” (affiliated with schema theory, as described by Hirsch (1985)) versus progressivism (which is affiliated with constructivism). Yet “as psycholinguist Frank Smith wisely notes, ‘In the two-thousand-year recorded history of reading instruction, as far as I have been able to discover, no one has devised a method of teaching reading that has not proved a success with some children.” (Meier, 2002, p. 27).
The battle between schema theory and socioculturalist theory is an intriguing development. Schema theory assumes that the human mind mediates information taken in through the senses, and integrates it into a structure made up of other information bits in order to contextualize and comprehend it. Socioculturalism says that meaning-making is essentially dialogic in nature, and highlights the role of mediational tools such as language, texts, and conversations.
In the past, schema theory was appropriated both by Progressivists such as Dewey and conservative educationists such as Hirsch. That the left and right once agreed on a topic might seem startling, but the polarization between right and left in literacy did not always exist. Instead, the polarization within the field of literacy seems to mirror the polarization of the culture wars and retribalization within our society. But while the polarization continues in society at large, within the field of literacy a truce has been declared as dialogue has recently emerged between socioculturalist (those opposing schema theory) and New Literacies scholars (who seek to expand schema theory).

History of Schemas

While the concept of schema theory can be traced to Plato and Aristotle, Kant is generally considered the first to speak of schemas as organizing structures that mediate how we see and interpret the world. For Bartlett, schemas highlighted the reciprocity between culture and memory. Dewey, a contemporary of Bartlett, later developed theories on the concept of transactionalism, the relationship between individual knowledge and cultural practice. For Piaget (1952), development was interpreted as an ongoing dialectic in which the individual assimilates new experience consistent with existing schemas or changes the schemas to fit his or her experience (McVee, Dunsmore & Gavelek, 2005). Schemas were originally meant to help researchers understand what processes were happening within the individual, but were transactionally linked to culturally organized experience. The transactional connection between the individual and the cultural experience was lost in relation to schema regarding the reading process as the concept was applied to cognitive science and psychological theory. As the link between individual and culture that was embedded in the original concept of transactional schemas broke, I suspect the field of literacy became polarized.
During the 1970s, schema became defined through cognitive psychology, which began to explore knowledge construction through computer metaphors, implying a dualism whereby the individual-as-knower stands apart from the world-as-known. Between 1978-88 research in schema theory was prevalent in journals (McVee, Dunsmore & Gavelek, 2005). This is far different than the transactionalist perspective which mediates between the two. As a remedy to the cognitivist approach, the socioculturalist perspective (as propounded by Florio-Ruane & McVee, 2000)—that thought has its genesis in social interaction—emerged. Socioculturalism says that meaning-making is essentially dialogic in nature, and highlights the role of language and texts.
Debating with the socioculturalists, New Literacies scholars point to the need to count diverse digital contexts, such as hypertexts, as forms of literacy, extending the schema construct. However, discussions of schema theory necessarily raise debates of cultural knowledge since even relatively subtle differences in people’s schemas can have dramatic differences on their interpretations. Unfortunately, research has not focused on schema construction, but only tested pre-made schemas.
While I think that it is a mistake to constantly break with continuity and drastically shift paradigms—since there has yet to be a heliocentric shift in the universe of literacy—I do not believe in creating syntheses that artificially unify the field. Rather, I believe that the field of literacy might be enriched through dialogue between two parties (rather than polemical discrediting of the opposing faction or hegemonic dominance of one party to the point of excluding the opposing viewpoint). As Pressley suggests in reference to teaching reading by phonics or whole language, it should not be an either/or, but both/and; I believe that this statement should be extended to the field of literacy as a whole.
Balanced Literacy Polemics

In “Balanced Literacy in an Urban School District,” Frey, Lee, Tollefson, Pass, and Massengill (2005) entered their study with the philosophy of “balanced literacy”—an approach that balances phonics and whole language, reading and writing, teacher-directed and student-directed activities—a sort of via media of education. This theory was supposed to bridge the educational religio-political divide between supporters of phonics and supporters of whole-language—an issue to literacy as divisive as the wars between Catholics and Protestants prior to the Elizabethan era. These two views of literacy were set out in the mid-1960s by the US Office of Education in publications regarding comparative research on reading instruction models for first graders, and later became solidified into the protracted battle that has continued into today.
To see if “balanced literacy” worked, the researchers collected data from 156 students in grades K-5 in 32 elementary schools in a high-poverty urban metropolitan area. These students had 72 teachers, whose classrooms were chosen for observation. The “balanced literacy” program had been implemented in all schools by district mandate; students were therefore subjected to a 90- to 120-minute “literacy” block every morning. No one asked if a “literacy” block were the most effective use of time; whether the time might be more effectively spent by breaking it down into smaller literacy intervals throughout the day, or whether students as young as five years old can even sit still for that long. The researchers had neither a “control group” to compare the “balanced literacy” approach to, nor a “before and after” study of the same schools, making their “research” more an exercise of polemics.
To indicate “literacy,” the researchers used classroom observations of students reading or being read to, classroom physical environment checklists of literacy components, physical building environment checklists of literacy components, teacher surveys, and student group interviews. The fact that the study was mixed method to help eliminate bias does not help much, considering that the researchers went into the study with a model they were trying to “prove.”
The researchers observed each classroom twice , and filled out a survey using the partial-interval recording format, summing up the data for each one-minute observational interval. In addition, they filled out a classroom physical environment checklist, indicating the presence of literacy centers, classroom libraries, reading nooks, examples of student work, and literacy posters or displays.
A third indicant was a school building environment checklist, searching for “physical features in the office, the hallways, and the library that reflected the school’s literacy activities” (Frey et al, 2005, p. 275).
The fourth indicant was self-reporting. Teachers filled out surveys on how often, or for how long they involved students in literacy activities each day. Self-reporting is notoriously unreliable, yet when you factor in that these teachers were under some duress, given that “balanced literacy” had just been mandated, it is unlikely that they would admit that they were not engaging students in a literacy activity for the requisite number of minutes, even if they were not.
The last indicant, student group interviews, might have been the strongest indicant in the study, considering that students had the least vested interest in the program, and were interviewed in a group, which is a more reliable method than self-reporting. Yet questions like, “Do you have time during the day when you can learn about reading and writing?” and “So, what do you guys like to read?” (Frey et al, 2005, p.276) were too vague to be of much help. The fact that students indicated that they enjoyed going to the public library and that their parents read to them at home seems to indicate that the interviews got off-base. To use triangulation with five weak indicants doesn’t help much, when the indicants used make little sense as stand-ins for “literacy.”
At the conclusion, while 98% of classrooms had classroom libraries, 97% had “literacy displays,” and 97% had a large group area for read-alouds and other activities, just over half the students said that they could find books at school—while almost all of the students agreed that there were adults at home who helped them read and write and find books at home or in the community (Frey et al, 2005, p. 278). This suggests that the posters were not an effective indicant for literacy. Although the researchers did not emphasize this gap, it seems striking that the students actually seemed to learn more about literacy at home than at school, based on their reporting.
I suspect that because the “balanced literacy” method is really a via media, that phonics proponents will continue to emphasize phonics more than whole-language, and that whole-language proponents will continue to emphasize whole-language over phonics, under the guise of promoting “balanced literacy.” However, based on this study, one cannot know whether “balanced literacy” is a “better” approach than any other method, or if, in implementation, it even exists.
What is known is that literacy is important not just for enjoyment but for everyday life. Reading signs, maps, bus schedules, directions on how to assemble a product, or directions for how to administer a medication: these are things literate individuals do every day without thinking about, and take for granted. Yet millions of illiterate individuals are locked out of this world because they are unable to decode or comprehend texts.
Document Reading

Document reading plays an important part in literacy, especially for adults, since documents are prevalent in modern society and the most common reading task on the job is document reading. Fifty to eighty percent of occupational reading tasks require workers to complete a specific task (Mosenthal & Kirsch, 1998, p. 639). Documents are complex in that they have many different organizational patterns such as tables, charts, schedules, maps, graphs, and forms, and have no universal grammar. Many literacy assessments include a document scale as well as a prose scale; these include the NAEP Young Adult Literacy Survey, the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), the International Education Assessment (Reading), the International Adult Literacy Survey, ETS’s Tests of Applied Literacy Skills, and the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills.
Since document readability is difficult to assess, Mosenthal and Kirsch suggested a readability formula to help evaluate such texts. The formula is based on two main components: organizational pattern and density. The researchers posited that all types of organization (i.e., including table, chart, schedule, map, graph, and form) stem from four types of lists: the simple list (of which there are two types: simple object lists, and simple modifying lists), combined list, intersected list, and nested list. They then assigned each of these types of lists a score: a simple list has a document structure score of 1, a combined list a score of 2, an intersected list a score of 3, and nested lists a score of 4. By working backwards with tables, charts, and schedules and figuring out which list type the form is based off of, a document score can be assigned.
Individuals who can read and comprehend the most complex documents tend to receive the highest scores on assessments of document literacy. While an individual’s high scores on assessments of document literacy may be seen as indicators of workplace success, literacy scores unfortunately differ between different ethnic groups. A major issue in literacy research is how to bridge the gap between ethnic groups, or if it can even be done.

Literacy Practices Among Different Ethnic Groups

Holt and Smith (2005) investigated the differences between the literacy scores of different socioeconomic and racial groups and the reading habits of these different groups. In entering their study, the researchers presumed the existence of two types of minorities: “voluntary” minorities (predominantly Asian-Americans) who immigrated to the US, and “involuntary” minorities (such as African-, Hispanic-, and Native- Americans). The researchers posited that “involuntary” minorities are less successful in educational endeavors and literacy scores because they do not want to identify with the “oppressor.” This explanation seemed a little too convenient for me, a bit like a “just-so” story explaining why Asian-Americans get higher scores than European-Americans even though they’re minorities. By grouping all “Asian-Americans” into one group, it does not take into consideration the diversity of circumstances under which Asian-Americans may have immigrated. For instance, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Hmongs may have immigrated under circumstances of considerable duress, compared to Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, or Chinese who may have come for greater educational or career opportunities. The situations of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Hmong may be more “involuntary” than voluntary, depending on personal circumstances and whether or not their migration was a result of the Vietnam War. In addition, the researchers assumed that voters were more knowledgeable than non-voters, although the study did not consider whether lack of transportation might have been an issue, or whether non-voters were as informed as the voters about the issues at hand but knowingly made a political statement by their abstention (i.e., “I don’t like either of the two candidates”). Gender was not accounted for, although it may have made a significant difference in the findings.
The question of the study was whether there were differences in literacy levels between different socio-economic and racial groups, and/or differences between socio-economic and racial groups’ reading habits. While the hypothesis was unstated, it was implied that African-Americans as a group would score lower on reading tests than any other ethnic group because they didn’t read as widely or as frequently as European-Americans (the majority social group) because African-Americans probably didn’t have equal access to good schools and libraries.
The group studied was large, insofar as the researchers used data from the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), the largest adult literacy survey conducted in the US—numbering 24,944 adult (16 years +) respondents with complete data—and was representative of the US population. The NALS study asked respondents about their reading of personal documents (letters, memos, magazines, and journals), quantitative documents (bills, invoices, spreadsheets, budget tables), documents (manuals, reference books, directions, and instructions), books, TV viewing for information (hours per day), and reliance on friends or relatives for information. Additional indicants were average annual family income, average annual family income of all the families surveyed in the neighborhood, parents’ educational attainment, home language, and whether the individual had a disability or illness. Essentially, the researchers took data collected from the respondents, set them in balance according to socioeconomic factors then divided the data into two groups—one group with 1/3 of respondents, the other group with 2/3 of respondents. They then used the second group as a check to the first group to see whether the data was valid, using hierarchical linear modeling, eigenvalues, promax rotation, and varimax rotation.
The study concluded that when family income (FI) and income of neighborhood (MIN) were controlled, African-Americans reported reading more sections of the newspaper than European-Americans. For both those above and below the poverty level, African-American adults received more information from TV, books, and magazines than did European-Americans. In addition, African-Americans read more types of books than did European-Americans.
However, African-Americans engaged in lower levels of work document reading than European-Americans, possibly attributable to their holding lower-level jobs.
On standardized tests, African-Americans’ literacy proficiency ended up being lower than European-Americans’, which the researchers believed to be due to a linguistic bias in the language used on standardized tests; I did not find this argument especially compelling considering that the African-Americans studied were apparently widely-read and were likely to have large working vocabularies acquired from reading. I however, began to think that perhaps African-Americans scored a lower proficiency on standardized literacy tests than European-Americans due to their lack of document reading. This question would be very interesting to explore; lining up groups of people matched for socioeconomic status, race, gender, and time spent on reading various personal documents, quantitative documents, and books, and merely comparing the number of work documents that the people read, and seeing if the scores differ. Overall, this study was compelling, insofar as the group studied was so large, but I disagreed with the researchers’ interpretation. Following Bourdieu, I think that perhaps document literacy scores reflect the skills of the hegemonic group who writes the test in their own interest.
Since document reading tests are not only distributed within the U.S., but globally, there is likely to be a cultural bias embedded within such tests. Nevertheless, since most of the world population does not live within the US, it is important to study these other countries as well. While no one has yet declared the fall of the nation-state, the world is “flattening out,” with the rise of technology, the internet, and outsourcing as Thomas Friedman wrote in The World is Flat (2005). With new forms of cooperation and collaboration increasing daily, we cannot afford to have large populations of illiterate people (in whatever way we decide to define the term “literacy”). As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, perhaps we are seeing the guiding force of the “invisible hand” leading us to do what’s right, as the economist/philosopher Adam Smith described so long ago. Who knows? Nevertheless, another nation’s concern for literacy must be our own as well.

Moroccan Literacy

In Lavy and Spratt’s (1997) study of patterns of incidence and change in Moroccan literacy, the topics under investigation were adult literacy skills and literacy levels and how they have changed over the years. However, it is necessary to note that the term “adult” in Morocco, like in Somalia, in statistical reports includes people aged 10-15 years. The authors’ goal was to “take a temperature” of Morocco’s literacy rate, and to see whether the number was going up (since a growing number of people worldwide are believed to be illiterate) or down. In addition, the authors examined the geographic distribution of literacy in Morocco to see if there were differences between the literacy rate in urban versus rural areas.
The literacy survey was designed with the help of World Bank and was conducted in connection with the 1990-91 Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS). 2/3 of those participating in the LSMS were given the literacy module. Those completing the literacy module included 2,240 households nationally. When a target household could not or did not participate, a similar replacement household was selected. The final sample of those completing the literacy module included 2,240 households and 8,050 people, of whom 47% were male and 49% lived in rural areas.
Since this survey ran concurrent with a government adult literacy campaign that reached 600,000 people during 1990-91, the results might be questionable, given that literacy instruction was widely distributed during this time, and the level of some skills might have superficially increased for a temporary period (if the skills were not truly absorbed, say in the case of an individual memorizing answers for a test). Scores may have therefore been inflated to higher rates than they otherwise would have been.
The Morocco Literacy Survey directly tested Arabic reading, including single letter and word decoding, comprehension of connected text, writing letters, words, and complete sentences, document reading of an identity card, letter envelope, electricity bill, medicine box, and newspaper; French reading and writing; and mental and written arithmetic. Vocabulary words and text tasks were selected from primary school books in Morocco.
In addition to direct testing, information was also collected through a traditional self-report survey. The self-report survey was completed by all people in a household between the ages of 9-69 years. The self-report section was given to participants first, and was used to screen people to see whether a higher or lower form of the literacy direct test should be given. Average time for a single administration [presumably of the self-report, although it was unclear] was 20 minutes.
Psychometric analyses of instrument reliability were conducted on pilot tests and on results of the first month of survey administration. Both direct tests and self-reports were graded in terms of competence scales between 0-3. Level 0 indicated that no competence was demonstrated—in other words, the individual was unable to decode or comprehend simple written words or to correctly write a simple dictated word. Level 1 indicated a rudimentary ability: the individual was able to demonstrate decoding and comprehension of single words and/or was able to correctly write single dictated words, but was unable to comprehend or write sentences or connected text. Level 2 indicated minimal competence, demonstrating the ability to comprehend simple texts—
although with some errors—and to write single dictated words without difficulty, completing sentences with some errors. Level 3 indicated complete fundamental competence; demonstrating the ability to comprehend a variety of texts, including a newspaper article, without error, and to write complete sentences without error.
Direct assessment of participants was cross-checked with the participants’ self-evaluation. They found that while underestimation of literacy skills was just over 1%, overestimation of skills was a more serious problem; roughly 5% of the population said that they were literate although they could show no literacy skills. Overall, 13.5% of the sample either overestimated or underestimated their literacy skills. Self-assessment differed by gender; while just 39% of males reported being illiterate, 44% actually were by direct test method. On the other hand, 68.2% of females reported being illiterate, while 70% tested out being so via the direct test method; in other words, females were more accurate in their self-reporting than males were. People who had 6 years of schooling in the Q’uranic (traditional Islamic) school also tended to overestimate their literacy level based on their years of schooling. Those who studied in secular schools had a lower incidence of illiteracy than those who studied for the same length of time at a Q’uranic school. Self-report data by kids aged 9-14 was again likely to have serious underestimations of illiteracy—self-report data resulted in an illiteracy rate that was more than 12% lower than the rate estimated using direct assessment. This discrepancy was even wider for subgroups such as boys of that age (16%) or for those living in rural areas (15%). Researchers stated that the rural-urban divide seemed to have an even greater impact on literacy than the gender gap, since the gender gap was even more pronounced in rural areas. The difference between direct-assessment-based illiteracy rates between urban (37.5%) and rural areas (76.9%) was dramatic.
Since in 71% of households, there was a perfect match between the skills of the head of the household and those of their spouse, the researchers proposed that skills be measured in terms of household rather than individual, where the group is the principal functioning unit (i.e., in tribal societies). In other words, based on this data, one could estimate adult illiteracy accurately simply by identifying illiterate households.
The authors also conducted a multivariate regression analysis to identify the relative importance of the correlates of literacy. The indicants (which they referred to as “potential explanatory variables”) included age, gender, residence milieu, parents’ literacy level, quintile of household per capita expenditures, years and type of schooling, and selected interaction terms. Age was strongly and negatively associated with literacy, as was female gender. The urban milieu had a strong positive influence on literacy level, as did literacy levels of mother and father. However, a mother’s literacy level was more highly correlated with a child’s literacy level than the father’s literacy level was.
While literacy levels are improving (doubling over the past three decades), creating a dramatic difference between the skill levels of older (55 years of age and up) and younger generations (15-24 years old), and even between age cohorts, the gender gap between skill levels also increased over time, due to the rate of improvement among men being greater than that among women, although both groups did improve. The urban population improved at a rate approximately three times greater than the rural population. While the rural-to-urban migration must be taken into account, the lack of development in rural areas is startling. Literacy levels obtained by direct assessment correlated highly with per capita household income, yet the richest rural quintile has a higher illiteracy rate (66.7%) than the poorest urban quintile (54.3%).
Surprisingly, within the labor force, the unemployed were endowed with more skills and an illiteracy rate under 14% while the rate among the employed is almost five times higher (62%). Similarly, mean years of schooling among the unemployed reached 11.3 years, much higher than the employed (3.7 years). In other words, those who were literate were much more likely to be unemployed, making literacy and education a ticket to nowhere for most people. The researchers suggested that jobs need to be more strongly connected to educational level before people will want to pursue an education.
Given that quantitative analysis can help delineate long-term trends, and that use of quantitative analysis implies that one can find general truths in numbers, the method does have its limitations; quantitative method cannot detail the impact that the unemployment of a literate person has on a single family; this would make an interesting follow-up study.
Using a method that the researchers in Morocco suggest, researchers in the Women and Literacy in India study used a survey method that includes one representative per household. In this case, because the researchers were interested in studying a literacy campaign’s effect on women, women were selected as the representative head of household, even though the culture might be more patriarchal.

Women and Literacy in India

Dighe (1997) investigated women’s literacy the urban setting of a re-settlement colony in Delhi, more specifically, whether women were empowered by the Total Literacy Campaign (TLC) program or not. It was unclear whether the author was involved in the campaign, or how she found out about the program in order to study it.
Dighe wanted to explore the effects of literacy groups on women’s reading ability, hypothesizing that female literacy learners probably took longer to become literate, just as it took female literacy learners longer to become literate in an African study. She also hypothesized that women were more prone to relapse into illiteracy than men, due to lack of opportunities to practice their newly learned skills.
Although there are several literacy groups in India—National Adult Education Program, Mahila Samkhya, Total Literacy Campaign (TLC), among others—the researcher selected the TLC group which operates in 250 districts because most of its attendees are women. To test women’s reading ability or “achievement,” she selected the standard National Literacy Mission’s literacy test, designed by the Directorate of Adult Education in 1992. The researchers chose to use the test as a standard measure in order to compare their study to others’ findings more readily, even though the researchers criticized some of the test questions that did not directly apply to the respondents’ daily lives—such as the question “do you know how to wire money?” when poor women infrequently do this. Following with the test’s tradition, if a respondent scored 70% or above, they were deemed “literate.”
The researchers selected a sample of women by dividing Ambedkernagar, a neighborhood of South Delhi, India, which has about 200,000 residents living in a 159-block area, into four geographically representative zones. They then randomly selected five blocks from each zone. For each of these selected blocks, a list of women who had completed the three TLC primers was obtained. Five respondents from each block were randomly selected—making the sample total 100 respondents. Although the sample was relatively small, it appears reasonable, insofar as its selection appears to have been unbiased, although it might have been better to have a control group to compare the TLC participants to.
The researchers then interviewed the 100 respondents about each member of their household. Information about sex, age, educational and occupational background was obtained. The researchers found an average of five members in a nuclear family household, and an average of six members in a joint household, of the households which they interviewed. 28.8% of the family members overall were illiterate, according to this method. Nearly 46% of females (aged 7+) were illiterate as compared to 14% of males.
Researchers looked around the respondents’ flats, and evaluated the respondents’ socioeconomic background based on examining the acquisition of certain household items, and ranking people as belonging to a high, medium, or low socioeconomic background. Yet, the authors did not name what items were used for this evaluation, or how the items were evaluated in a standardized way, considering that there were apparently multiple researchers in the field.
As a next step, the researchers provided the respondents with an open-ended questionnaire in order to gain some more qualitative insights. Apparently, the questionnaire was read aloud to respondents (although the researchers did not make this explicit). The interview included topics such as “place of origin and reason for migration,” “age and marital status,” “socioeconomic status,” “previous level of education,” “awareness of the literacy campaign,” “family support for literacy,” “interest in literacy,” “opinion about literacy volunteers and teaching/learning methods used,” “satisfaction of attending literacy classes,” and “frequency of watching/listening to TV and radio.”
Following the completion of the questionnaire, respondents sat down to take the National Literacy Mission exam. Some respondents were apparently eager to complete the test by this time, and such a fact might have skewed some of the results. Under these circumstances, only 16% of all respondents (those who completed all three TLC primers in the program) were able to reach the NLM norm for “literate.” The authors attributed this to an atrophy of literacy skills resulting from disuse (and a lack of provision of post-literacy reading materials) rather than the intrusive nature and length of the study.
In the study, several methodological errors were made. For instance, the questionnaire seems to have been far too long considering that it was only one part of a long process. As a general rule, the longer or more complicated the survey, the higher the non-completion rates. While it is probably easier for respondents to leave off a phone interview than to push a researcher out the door, I imagine that rushing through the exam may have been one way for respondents to get the researchers out of their home sooner. I am also curious as to how conspicuous the researchers’ “search” of the respondents’ apartments was, because it may have added to a participant’s feeling of discomfort in participating. It may also have contributed to participants’ rushing through the exam. This step may have been better eliminated, especially considering that the researchers do not appear to have had a steady scale for measuring the objects.
Because the author was concerned with empowering women, writing that “Literacy has to be perceived as a tool for empowering women in the wider struggle against inequality and injustice in society” (Dighe, 1992, p. 7)—confusing the role of the researcher with the role of the policy-maker—she seemed to imply a Freire-ian paradigm of empowering illiterates through discussions of politics and the world by literacy groups composed of volunteers (who were neighbors of the illiterate) and illiterates conversing on a level playing field about things that mattered to them. Freire suggested creating literacy groups that promote both dialogue and critical literacy, empowering the oppressed to read the word in order to read the world (namely what’s going on behind the scenes). When Freire’s standard of leading the illiterate adults in discussion towards a higher consciousness was not lived up to, because the discussions between the literacy learners and literacy volunteers were not as interesting or as connected to the world (rather than just learning the text) as Dighe thought they “should have been,” the volunteers were faulted. This suggests the Dighe based her study on sociocultural theory that avoids blaming the illiterate for his/her illiteracy, but did not extend the benefit of the doubt to volunteers who were equally impoverished or “oppressed” and had little training in literacy instruction.
Freire’s model—namely of creating literacy groups that promote dialogue and critical literacy— is apparently the dominant theory practiced in literacy campaigns. Since criticality, such as espoused by Freire’s critical pedagogy, presumes reflection on one’s assumptions, it requires dialogue with opposing view points. It is ironic that “critical pedagogy” has become un-critical through rising to the hegemonic heights which the field of literacy has enshrined it in. Since its proponents have become concerned with its preservation, they have become unreflexive and failed to recognize its limitations or think differently. If Freire’s model is to continue to be “critical,” and develop, it needs to dialogue with a counter-posed model.
In addition, I find Freire’s model to be internally inconsistent in that because it presumes the world can be read (assuming a dualistic worldview often associated with cognitivism that implies that the individual is not a part of the world as it is created and needs to uncover a reality which he/she is not a part of ) even though he claims truth is uncovered through dialogue with others (a position in line with socioculturalism which states that meaning-making is essentially dialogic in nature, and highlights the role of mediational tools such as language, texts, and conversations). I find it doubtful that Freire is presenting a new form of transactionalism. Instead, the fact that Freire’s model is internally inconsistent highlights the need for a counter-posed model to dialogue with it in order to work out the kinks, and create a new synthesis, or a better theory.

Conclusion

Since the field of literacy is relatively young, there is definitely room for improvement. To begin with, we need to more clearly define the term “literacy” and what is implied by it—whether we mean decoding or comprehension or numeracy or reading to do.
In addition, I believe that the field of literacy might be enriched through dialogue between those holding opposing viewpoints (rather than polemical discrediting of the opposing faction or hegemonic dominance of one party to the point of excluding the opposing viewpoint). Resurrecting the concept of transactionalism might help. While it is apparently standard for literacy tests to include both a direct-measure and survey portion, ideally, quantitative studies might also be augmented by creating qualitiative studies to accompany them.
Because research has not focused on schema construction, and only tested pre-made schemas, experiments on schema construction should be undertaken. We know little about the role of schema in regards to literacy and cultural knowledge even though so much of our research is based on this sketchy concept.
Since few studies exploring race and literacy have been done, it would be interesting to explore whether African-Americans score a lower proficiency on standardized literacy tests than European-Americans due to their lack of document reading by lining up groups of people matched for socioeconomic status, race, gender, and time spent on reading various personal documents, quantitative documents, and books, and merely comparing the number of work documents that the people read, and seeing if the scores differ. It would be even more interesting to see if this pattern holds in other countries by examining minority scores versus the scores of the hegemonic group.
It would also be interesting to extend Stoodley, Talcott, and Carter’s study (2000) about dyslexics’ weaker vibrotacticle sensitivity and see whether dyslexia affects phonetic learning. I suspect that the phonics method of teaching reading does not work for dyslexic students, considering that they perceive tones and sounds differently. I do not believe that such a test has been undertaken.
Since 1990, interest in international studies of literacy has grown, following the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand (Lavy & Spratt, 1997, p. 120). Despite a growing interest in literacy, the most commonly referenced source of information on national literacy levels remain census-based statistics of individual countries. Censuses contain problems of definition, measurement, and interpretation. Based on educational attainment information, self-report, or third-person report, censuses depend on some questionable assumptions. International studies have been difficult to draw conclusions from since literacy assessments do not have standards which are comparable. Even after 1990, we have continued to compare apples to oranges. I believe that there is a strong need for a set of agreed-upon indicants; for instance, it would be helpful if everyone agreed to define “adults” as those aged 18 years and up, versus 7 or 9 or 16 years of age, for ease of comparison. In addition, it would help if researchers set test-tasks at an agreed-upon level (i.e., primary or secondary) and style (academic tasks versus tasks based on daily life skills) or set of skills tested (i.e., wiring money, comprehending a college-level text, decoding letters or sentences), and agreed on a scale with which to compare the resultant scores. There are currently a multitude of measures, scores, and scales representing this undefined term “literacy” (i.e., 70% or above on the NLM exam in India, versus scores of 0-3 on a scale in Morocco) rendering comparison meaningless. A standard scale of comparison for use in international studies would prove invaluable to the field.

References

Anderson, C. (1982). History of Adult Reading Programs. College and Adult Reading XI NCRA Yearbook, 1-14.

Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. (2001). Confessions. (R. Warner, Trans.). NY: Signet Classic.

Cohen, D.K., & Neufeld, B. (1981). The Failure of High Schools and the Progress of Education. Daedalus, 110, 81.

Dighe, A. (1995). Women and Literacy in India: a study in a re-settlement colony in Delhi. Reading, England: Education for Development.

Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. NY: Continuum.

Frey, B., Lee, S., Tollefson, N., Pass, L., & Massengill, D. (2005). Balanced Literacy in an Urban School District. Journal of Education Resources, 98, 5, 272-280.

Friedman, T.L. (2005). The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.

Hirsch, E.D. (1988). Cultural Literacy. NY: Vintage Books.

Holt, J.K. & Smith, M.C. (2005). Literacy Practices Among Different Ethnic Groups: the role of Socioeconomic and Cultural Factors. Reading Research and Instruction 44, 3. 1-21.

Lavy, V., & Spratt, J. (1997). Patterns of Incidence and Change in Moroccan Literacy. Comparative Education Review, 41, 2. 115-141.

McVee, M.B., Dunsmore, K., & Gavelek, J.R. (2005). Schema Theory Revisited. Review of Educational Research, 75, 4, 531-566.

Meier, D. (2002). The Power of Their Ideas. Boston: Beacon Press, 27.

Mosenthal, P.B. & Kirsch, I.S. (1998). “A New Measure for Assessing Document Complexity: The PMOSE/IKIRSCH document readability formula.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 41:8, 638-657.

National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983). A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. 2.

Sedlak, M., Wheeler, C., Pullin, D., & Cusick, P. (1986). Selling Students Short: Classroom Bargains and Academic Reform in the American High School, NY: Teacher’s College Press, 18.

Stoodley, C., Talcott, J.B., Carter, E.L. (2000). Selective deficits of vibrotactile sensitivity in dyslexic readers. Neuroscience Letters, 295, 1-2, 13-16.

Then and Now: African-American Students in South Carolina’s Public Schools

2005-11-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

The purpose of this study is to describe the government document Statistics of the Education of Negroes 1929-1930 and 1931-32 by David T. Blose, Assistant Statistician, and Ambrose Caliver, Senior Specialist in the Education of Negroes, Office of Education, Bulletin 1935, No. 13, and compare it to the 1996 State Profile of Education for South Carolina by David Burnett, National Cooperative Education Statistics Liaison, and Jo Ann Kerrey, Common Core of Data Survey Coordinator, compiled for the National Center of Education Statistics. While the government has records on many states, I have chosen to compare data from South Carolina because of this state’s involvement with the Civil Rights movement in relation to education. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, a consolidation of four interrelated cases, included South Carolina’s Briggs v. Elliott. The 1999 Abbeville County School District v. State which sued for adequate funding included forty school districts from South Carolina. By comparing documents about the situation of African-American students during the 1931-32 and 1995-96 school years in South Carolina, both pre-integration, and post-integration, pre-Brown and pre-Abbeville, we are able to get a better picture of the nature and conditions of schools for African-Americans. Both were periods of mild unrest just preceding major litigation.[1] Some indicants of the educational milieu for African-American students include the statewide rates of African-American students attending public schools versus the total number of African-American school-aged students in the population, the percentage of school dropouts, the student-teacher ratio, and the ratio of salary for teachers of African-American students compared to the salary for teachers of white students. Since statewide statistics give a broad and blurred picture of what is going on, after describing the bigger picture, I focus my lens on a single school district: Florence 4, to see what impact the Abbeville decision and NCLB legislation has had on equality today.
When I began comparing the documents, Statistics of the Education of Negroes 1929-1930 and 1931-32 and the 1996 State Profile of Education for South Carolina, I noticed that the 1931-32 statistics were much more interesting, in that they included a context which detailed not only how many students attended school, but how many did not. The 1996 data, on the other hand, listed only the number of students attending, putting a positive spin on the hard facts. To put the 1996 data in its context, I compared the number of African-American students attending public schools to the total number of African-American residents of South Carolina in that age group, using information from the 1990 US Census.[2] According to my calculations, approximately 316,329 African-American residents between the ages of 5-18 resided in South Carolina. In 1996, the report said that of the 652,815 students in public elementary and secondary schools, 42.2% were African-American—or about 275,488 African-American students in all. So approximately 87% of African-Americans aged 5-18 years old in South Carolina attended public schools in 1996. However, that figure was not directly comparable to the 1931 figure which included just 5-17 year olds—77.2% of whom attended public schools.[3] I suspect that in 1931, it was common for students to have graduated from high school by age 17, and that reason could account for why the figure does not include 18-year-olds. In addition, students’ skipping grades seems to have been a more common practice around the 1930s than it is today. Yet, despite factors such as earlier graduation ages, I feel that it is unfair to compare apples to oranges—5-18 year old African-Americans attending school in South Carolina in 1996 to 5-17 year old African-Americans attending school in 1931. By isolating the relatively large population of 18-year-olds from the 1990 census figure, it turns out that 157,151 African-American students aged 5-17 years attended public school out of the 197,992 South Carolina residents aged 5-17 living in the state—or about 79%. Compare this figure to the 77.2% of African-Americans 5-17 years of age residing in South Carolina who attended public schools in 1931,[4] and that leaves a 1.8% increase in attendance.
This 1.8% increase was hard-won through numerous factors such as a crackdown of truant officers seeing why students were not attending school, a new stigma attached to school dropouts,[5] a lack of jobs for people without their high school diploma,[6] increased stringency of compulsory attendance laws, stricter enforcement of child labor laws, improved transportation (such as busing) of students to school,[7] integration of schools after Brown v. the Board of Education, and increased funding for African-American-dominated schools.
In that light, the fact that 77.2% of African-Americans between the ages of 5 and 17 attended public schools in 1931-32 is quite amazing. The remaining 22.8% who didn’t attend public schools include students who graduated from school before age 17, those who may have attended private schools, and those who just had too far to walk to make it to school. They attended school despite the fact that attending did not erase prejudice, did not guarantee them a job or an advanced position, and did not help feed their families. Sometimes their school attendance was opposed by the local whites. It is evident that these students, or their parents, prized education for its intrinsic value alone.
Clearly, in the 1930s, school drop-outs were almost expected, whereas increased enrollments were noteworthy: “The increased enrollments in the upper grades may be the result of several causes, among which are: (1) improvement in grade distribution and (2) increased enrollment of children in the upper grades who were enrolled in private schools” (Blose & Caliver, 1935, p.3). Nevertheless, the authors did note one point of concern, namely that “The enrollment of girls is 53.4 percent greater than that of boys. The enrollment of girls in the fourth year of high school is 74 percent greater than that of boys. These data emphasize one of the major problems in the education of Negroes—that of reducing the elimination of boys from elementary and high school” (Blose & Caliver, 1935, p.4-5). The fact that girls outnumbered boys by such a large margin was concerning, since it ran counter to the traditions of white Americans, who sent their boys to school rather than their girls.[8]
Although such a problem was noted with apprehension in 1935 when the government report was published, the more recent 1996 State Profile of Education for South Carolina tells us that of the 15.2% of high school students who dropped out,[9] 60.1% were male and 50.1% were minority. In some districts, over 60% of the students dropped out before they graduated.[10] Clearly, African-American males have continued to drop out of school in greater number than their white or female peers. “Each year's class of dropouts will cost the country over $200 billion during their lifetimes in lost earnings and unrealized tax revenue. Dropouts comprise nearly half of the heads of households on welfare and an even higher percentage of the prison population” (Hale, 1998). The fact that a gender bias remains unaddressed sixty-four years after it was first noted is troubling.
The fact that of the 15.2% of students statewide who dropped out in 1996, 12.3% received their diplomas through alternate means, suggests that many of these students were not “dropouts” in the traditional sense, but likely “push-outs,” who received letters from their principals either forcing them or counseling them to attend an adult education program granting GEDs (Sunderman, Kim & Orfield, 2005, p. 107). These students are casualties of the recent NCLB legislation. “While proponents argue that test-driven accountability will motivate schools and teachers to improve instruction, research suggests that placing the emphasis almost entirely on test-driven consequences also creates unintended negative incentives, including higher numbers of dropouts (Abrams & Haney, 2004). Rather than stimulating schools to improve their instruction as intended, the pressure to raise scores can lead to practices that effectively push out low achievers in order to boost school achievement profiles” (Sunderman, et al., 2005, p. 105). The fact that 60.1% of these dropouts were male and 50.1% were minority suggests de facto discrimination.
Although the number of pupils per teacher for African-American schools has dropped from 48.5 students to one teacher in 1932 to a state average of 15 students to one teacher in 1996, and an average ratio of 12 students to one teacher in Timmonsville, the reason for fewer students per teacher may be simply that more African-American students are dropping out or are forced out of rural schools today.
While schools were clearly segregated in the 1930s before the Brown v. the Board of Education decision (1954), the schools have tended to become re-segregated in recent years. “The last constructive act by congress on the issue of integrated schools and neighborhoods was the enactment of the federal desegregation aid program in 1972 (repealed by the Reagan administration in 1981). The Supreme Court began limiting desegregation in key ways in 1974 and actively dismantling desegregation in 1991” (Frankenberg, Lee & Orfield, 2003, p.67). The fact that the Supreme Court ruled to limit desegregation in 1991 may have impacted the 1996 South Carolina statistics just five short years hence.
Nevertheless, statewide statistics do not detail school-specific situations.[11] Let’s examine Florence County, an area located approximately equidistant from the state capital, Columbia, and Myrtle Beach. While Florence County had a population of just 114,344 people total in 1990, the county is divided into a startling five school districts. District 4—rural Timmonsville is currently the worst-performing school on standardized tests in the nation. The Timmonsville School complex houses the elementary, middle, and high schools in a single three-wing building and its enrollment of 1,098 students has a minority rate of 87.4%--the minority being predominantly African-American (Rural Schools Presentation). That this school district’s minority rate is a startling 87.4% does not reflect the fact that just 38.7% of Florence County’s population is African-American and 0.5% of the population is of a race other than white or African-American. In the Timmonsville school complex, the white students disappear as the students advance by grade level. By the time the students reach high school, there are perhaps fewer than ten white students.[12] Overall, Timmonsville Schools have a poverty rate of 82%; 60% of students in Timmonsville are eligible for a free school lunch, at 8% are eligible for a reduced school lunch (Rural Schools Presentation).[13]
Statewide statistics tend to hide such hard facts as the poverty and racial segregation—which are daily realities for Timmonsville students—under blanket statements. On the other hand, the Timmonsville district has hidden test scores from the state, since the 1996 State Profile of Education for South Carolina notes that only 79.4% of students tested in 2003-04 had their 2002-03 scores located.[14] One can only guess what one fifth of the student body’s test scores might have told us about the school’s particular situation.
No doubt, the school district had good reason to try and hide a few score reports, since the NCLB as it stands has draconian punishments for schools. While Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (EASA) was enacted in the 1960s to help equalize the funding of low-income and minority students, the NCLB legislation which replaced it dictates the pace of progress required for all schools, regardless of the students they serve and the resources they have. Indeed, NCLB takes away Title I money from schools which fail to meet its Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) goals.
In spite of hiding 20% of their students’ scores, Timmonsville still failed to meet AYP goals for more than two consecutive years, making it the target of sanctions under the NCLB Act. These sanctions include parental notification of the school’s failure, parental option to transfer their child to another school, and allocation of Title I money for student vouchers. As of 2005, the classrooms in the Timmonsville complex are filled with South Carolina state personnel evaluating the teachers, curriculum specialists, and teacher specialists for math and English. To place the blame on teachers for students’ failure in school is problematic since racially gerrymandered districting placed the most difficult students within a particular school to begin with.[15] “…Any proper conception of the world society must accept the principle of the moral equality of races and nations” (Counts, 1932, p. 27).
While poor black farmers went to court after World War II to ask for the busing of their children, in a case that was later overtaken by demands for complete desegregation in the four consolidated cases in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which included South Carolina's Briggs v. Elliott, racially gerrymandered districting is no longer addressed at all. Instead, predominantly black school districts have been seeking sufficient funding for education—reminiscent of Plessy v. Ferguson’s (1896) “separate but equal” doctrine.
Yet, the demands for funding in recent years are not even as strong as they were in Plessy, for whereas the focus was once on “equity” and trying to ensure that economically deprived students were provided with resources equal to those of the rich, enabling them to compete in society, the court cases are now “adequacy” cases, regarding whether states are providing sufficient resources to produce school graduates capable of basic functioning in society (Cose, 2004). In 1988, the Richland County v. Campbell case for equal funding was dismissed, but continuing inequities led to the Abbeville County School District v. State (1999) case where forty impoverished public school districts[16] and twenty private taxpayers sued the state of South Carolina, demanding adequate funding. Florence County District 4, home of the Timmonsville complex, was one of the plaintiffs involved.[17] The plaintiff districts happened to average an 88.4% minority rate, whereas the South Carolina state average for minorities was 48.1%--about half as much. The school districts cited problems such as high teacher turnover due to low salaries and meager benefits, uncertified teachers, overcrowding, lack of equipment, and graduation rates that varied between 33 and 57% (Access, 2005). In the Abbeville case, one of the main complaints the school districts made was that because their teachers made less money than in other South Carolina districts, fewer teachers continued at the schools, as many as 1/3 of the teachers were new each year, and almost three times as many teachers held substandard certificates in the rural districts along I-95 as did school districts in the rest of South Carolina (Corridor of Shame [movie-on-demand]).
The 1996 State Profile of Education for South Carolina report provided a glimpse at a problem that was made clear in the Abbeville trial, noting that “1.1% of public school teachers in South Carolina have no degree, and 49.1% hold a “bachelor’s or lower degree.” What this means is, at least some of the teachers grouped in the “bachelor’s” category may have held a 2-year certificate degree rather than a regular diploma, which may or may not have been in education, and those teachers may or may not have received training in teaching or classroom management. These unqualified and under-qualified teachers were more likely to be concentrated in the lower-performing schools, where teachers earn far less than in more affluent districts, and where they were more likely to encounter challenging students.
The outcome of the 101-day Abbeville trial was that the state of South Carolina was required to provide the chance for each child to receive a “minimally adequate education” and the opportunity to acquire “ 1) the ability to read, write, and speak the English language, and knowledge of mathematics and physical science; 2) a fundamental knowledge of economic, social, and political systems, and of history and governmental processes; and 3) academic and vocational skills” (Fogle, 2000).While teachers of African-American students earned $487 per annum in South Carolina in 1931-32—versus $879 per annum for teachers of white students in the same period, despite a numerical increase in salaries by 1996, the wage gap between teachers of white students and teachers of African-American students actually grew in that period—from a 45% gap in income to a 57% gap (Blose & Caliver, 1935; Burnett & Kerrey, 1996). While the 1996 State Profile of Education for South Carolina listed the average teacher salary as $52,659 per year, first year teachers received an average wage of $22,681 in 1996. (See Fig. 1 & 2). And despite the Abbeville precedent, in Timmonsville in 2005, teachers with over 20 years experience are still placed on the pay scale as first year teachers, first year teachers have been termed “substitute teachers” to drop their salaries, and locals with just a high school diploma have been hired as substitute teachers. Yet, as George Counts reminds us, “The power that teachers exercise in the schools can be no greater than the power they wield in society” (Counts, 1932, p. 25). By undervaluing the teachers of African-American students, our society is undercutting the teachers’ independent effectiveness even within the schools, and their ability to enact change.

Fig. 1 Teacher Income in South Carolina

Fig. 2 Income Gap Between Teachers of African-American Students v. Teachers
of White Students in South Carolina

The Timmonsville district has been using this administrative technique of re-scaling the salary schedule since at least 1995 in order to balance its budget. Principals have voluntarily gone unpaid for three-month stretches.[18] Although the Abbeville precedent promised more equitable school funding, the districts involved have yet to see an impact.
What is more, between 1931-32 and 2000, the school year for African-American students was extended from 114 days to a state-imposed minimum of 180 days (See Fig. 3). What this means is that teachers in the African-American schools are working more time for less.

Fig. 3 Length of School Year (in days) for African-American Students in
South Carolina

The fact that this wage gap has gone unrecorded on the 1996 State Profile of Education for South Carolina means that it has been removed from statisticians’ and policy makers’ consciousness. Whereas such a fact was stated in black and white in the 1931-32 statistics, naming the problem, and perhaps helping to provide documentation that served as solid evidence of discrimination for later court cases, the documentation has now all but disappeared. Yet, we cannot just imagine away discrimination; it exists whether we name it or not.
In a little over 60 years, between 1931 and 1996, the US fought four wars,[19] put a man on the moon, invented the computer, the atomic bomb, and the mobile phone, yet the US has not been able or willing to offer African-American students an equal education. The fact that school districts in South Carolina have returned to asking for adequate funding for their schools implies that the state has regressed not only back to the era before Brown v. the Board of Education but regressed to times prior to 1931-32, years in which an awareness of injustice was quietly raised and inequalities were questioned. Silence on the topic of inequality supports it. De facto segregation today is proving much harder to fight than the de jure discrimination of the past, although the South Carolina practice of multiple school districts in a county appears to promote segregation.[20] Rather than congratulating ourselves on the so-called “progress” we have made in terms of racial equality, we must take a hard look at our institutions and the facts, and work towards change. For, “If America should lose her honest devotion to democracy, or if she should lose her revolutionary temper, she will no longer be America. In that day, if it has not already arrived, her spirit will have fled and she will be known merely as the richest and most powerful of nations” (Counts, 1932, p. 28).

REFERENCES

Abbeville County School District, et al. v. the State of South Carolina et al. http://www.cas.sc.edu/poli/civiced/Reference%20Materials/ABBEVILLE%20COUNTY%20SCHOOL%20DISTRICT,%20et%20al_%20v_%20THE%20STATE%20OF%20SOUTH%20CAROLINA,%20et%20al.htm (21 October 2005).
Access. http://www.schoolfunding.info/states/sc/lit_sc.php.3 (21 October 2005).
Ackerlof, G.A., and Kranton, R.E., (2002, December). Identity and Schooling: Some Lessons for the Economics of Education. Journal of Economic Literature. (Vol. XL).
Blose, D.T. & Caliver, A. (1935). Statistics of the Education of Negroes 1929-30 and 1931-32. (Bulletin No. 13). Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior and Office of Education.
Burnett, D. and Kerrey, J. 1996 State Profile of Education for South Carolina. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2000/stateprofiles/state_profiles/south_carolina.asp (17 October 2005).
Caliver, A. (1936). Availability of Education to Negroes in Rural Communities. (Bulletin, 1935, No. 12). Washington: US Department of the Interior and Office of Education.
Corridor of Shame: the Neglect of South Carolina’s Rural Schools.
http://www.corridorofshame.com/ (23 October 2005).
Corridor of Shame: the Neglect of South Carolina’s Rural Schools. http://www.myetv.org/about_etv/pressroom/highlights/2005/may/CorridorofShame.cfm [movie-on-demand]. (21 October 2005).
Cose, E. (2004, May 9). The Fight for Decent Schooling. Newsweek. http://www.couplescompany.com/Features/Politics/2004/Segregation2.htm (23 October 2005).
Counts, G.S. (1932) Dare the School Build a New Social Order?, NY: John Day.
Dobbs, M. (2004, June 7). Poor Schools Sue for Funding. Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20727-2004Jun6. (19 October 2005).
Frankenberg, E., Lee, C., and Orfield, G. (2003, January). A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream? http://magic.msu.edu/search/aOrfield/aorfield/1,5,43,B/l856&FF=aorfiel%20d+gary&10,,23,1,0 (20 October 2005).
Fogle, J.L. (2000). Abbeville County School District v. State: The Right to a Minimally Adequate Education in South Carolina. (51 South Carolina Law Review 420).
General Population and Housing Characteristics: 1990. http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=n&_lang=en&qr_name=DEC_1990_STF1_DP1&ds_name=DEC_1990_STF1_&geo_id=04000US45 (18 October 2005).
Hale, L.F. (1998). School Dropout Prevention: Information and Strategies for Parents. http://www.moreland.k12.ca.us/Discovery/NASP/dropout_rk.html (20 October 2005).
Population (1980 and 1990) and Population by Race (1990) of SC Metropolitan Statistical Areas. http://www.sciway.net/statistics/scsa98/pop/pop6a.html (19 October 2005).
Scheduling/Length of School Year. http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/55/26/5526.doc (19 October 2005).
State of South Carolina: Annual District Report Card 2004, Florence 4 School District. http://www.myscschools.com/offices/research/getpage.cfm?id=1451 (7 October 2005).
Sunderman, Gail L., Kim, J.S., and Orfield, G. (2005). NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, an imprint of Sage Publications.

[1] Lawsuits for busing African-American students occurred after WWII, and eventually led to Brown. The Brown case was filed in 1951, the decision handed down in 1954, and the following year, Martin Luther King jr. organized a bus boycott in Montgomery, AL.
[2] In the U.S., a census has been taken every 10 years from 1790 through 2000, so the 1990 census was the most recent in relation to the 1996 South Carolina State report.
[3] Neither of these figures include students who attend private schools or are home schooled.
[4] 223,710 African-American students attended public school in 1931-32 in South Carolina, whereas 289,700 estimated African-Americans between the ages of 5-17 lived in the state at the time (Blose & Caliver, 1935, p.22).
[5] A stigma was attached to dropping out of high school when universal attendance began to be realized, around the 1950s.
[6] The students who attended school in the 1930s had to forgo the opportunity to earn income to support their family through jobs in factories, on the farm, or working for the CCC, unlike their counterparts who attended school in later years.
[7] Transportation was a particularly important issue in rural areas (Caliver, 1936). After WWII, poor African-American farmers sued to receive busing for their children.
[8] Perhaps this trend of African-American girls attending school in greater numbers led to the matriarchal household of African-American culture today.
[9] 12.3% of the total number of dropouts received their diploma through an alternative method at a later time
[10] The high school drop out rates for the plaintiff school districts in the Abbeville County School District v. State (1999) case ranged from between 44-67% (http://www.corridorofshame.com/).

[11] For instance, in a study by Frankenberg, Lee, and Orfield (2003, p. 50), South Carolina was not the most segregated state, and had 38.9% whites in a typical black school, whereas 62.5% of Michigan’s African-American students were enrolled in schools with 90-100% minority rates.
[12] White males in the high school are especially rare, and are often referred to as “wanks” by their African-American peers (a local equivalent of the “N-word”). Schools with a majority of white (black) students adjust their ideals for the student population. Therefore, black students in a predominantly white school are much more likely to “dread” English and math classes in a white school than a black school (and vice versa). (Akerlof & Kranton, 2002, p. 1193). This phenomenon can lead to behavioral and discipline problems for the minority student, who is in this case white.
While the official report on Timmonsville High School from the National Center of Education Statistics records 39 white students out of 336 total, I have received figures from teachers in the school ranging from 5-8 white students currently in attendance.
[13] versus 47% eligible for a free lunch and 9% eligible for a reduced price lunch statewide
[14] It is highly unlikely that 20% of student test scores would disappear otherwise, considering that we are in the age of computers and back-up files. It is also unlikely that such a high percentage of missing scores would be attributable to student mobility.
[15] It would be interesting to find out how long Florence has been separated into five school districts, but I have been unable to locate any documents indicating this.
[16] South Carolina has 91 school districts in all, so nearly half the districts sued. The Abbeville case is alternatively known as the Clarendon case.
[17] It is interesting to note that while all five Florence County School Districts were part of the litigation, only Orangeburg Districts 1, 2, 3, 6, and 8 were involved. It is possible that Orangeburg Districts 4, 5, and 7 received adequate funding, and therefore were not part of the Abbeville suit. In addition, Lexington District 4 was the only Lexington district involved in the suit. This is notable, since it begs the question, “what about districts 1, 2, and 3?” Evidently, the funding between districts within a county varies.
[18] Facts according to a personal interview with the former principal of Timmonsville High School in July 2005.
[19] WWII (1941-45), Korea (1950-53), Vietnam (1961-73), Persian Gulf/Desert Storm (1991). After 1996, the US has been involved in an additional two wars—Afghanistan and Iraq (2001-present). The computer was invented at Iowa State in 1942 by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. The mobile phone was invented in 1975.
[20] By having multiple school districts within a single county, the offspring of wealthy citizens can attend one set of schools, poor citizens another, and African-Americans yet another set. These students will never mingle with one another, and are in fact segregated. However, because there are more than two sets of schools, the segregation becomes harder to prove. Maintaining multiple school districts within a small region is inefficient in terms of cost, so there must be another reason why it is being supported in South Carolina.

2005 (c) Elizabeth Bechtel