Idea 3.1 Culture

‘Culture’ is one of the most complex concepts in human language; no matter how much I say about culture, there will be much more to say. My favorite definition of culture comes from “Ishmael,” by Daniel Quinn: “A culture is a [group of] people enacting a story” (insert mine). Every person, every family, every community, every school, every workplace, and every country has a culture—or more than one—and subcultures as well. To make this clear, we do not even agree on whether the primary purpose of public education is to educate citizens in American culture or to produce workers—these two purposes clash culturally. Each clique in a middle or high school is practicing its own subculture, even as the school has a culture. Students arrive in class, and the teacher co-creates the classroom culture.

One of the most contentious questions in American public education involves the education of minorities. It has been twenty years since I read, “Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs,” by ethnographer, Paul Willis. I love looking at culture in the same way science fiction writers do—looking at an issue without the baggage of emotions about the subject. Working class British kids are the same “race” (there is no biological category called by that name) as those of those classes higher up in the hierarchy; in this case, looking at the class status of the students provides an acceptable alternative to racial status. This is an extremely valuable tool, if one is careful to choose analogies wisely.

The students that Willis followed systematically rejected the culture of education—an upper middle class construct—and recreated the factory culture of their parents in the school. Because the teachers were largely unaware of the cultural forces at work, the students were able to easily impose their culture in the classroom and the playground, in part, by refusing to internalize the alien culture that teachers were unknowingly trying to foist on them. Now, let’s look at an American example of cultural conflict using African American students.

One example I use to demonstrate this conflict in the US is the attempt in the 90s to use African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in instruction of African-American students. The thought was to take these students and teach them that their home language was a dialect of English and teach them how to translate it into Standard English. By valuing the students’ home language, teachers hoped to increase their desire to learn the school language. One group of educators, aware of the cultural nature of language, wanted to improve the education of these young Black students. When kids who speak AAVE at home are confronted with white teachers who don’t value their culture, the kids are faced with poor choices. Imagine a kindergartener going to school and finding for the first time that her teacher thinks that the way everyone she has ever known of loved “talks wrong.” The child either embraces the judgment that there is something wrong with her and her loved ones—or resists—if you don’t value those I love, why should I value you? But the US has another culture that seems to be valued more than the culture of education.

If you look at a map of the fifty states that shows the highest paid public employee in each, in thirty-nine of them, that person is a coach—either football or basketball. Think about the gross revenues of the National Football League, (NFL) National Basketball Association, (NBA) and Major League Baseball (MLB)—not to mention women’s leagues, soccer, golf, tennis, arena football, stock car, formula 1, and drag racing. Then, think about the glamour of movie and TV stars, reality TV celebrities, and the fifteen minutes of fame that one achieves by being part of a news story. Most of us in the education community have no idea how students make sense of the preeminence of entertainment in their lives.

If a child tries to figure out on her own what the most important thing is in American culture, the answer is likely to be entertainment.   I have come to the shocking conclusion that there are only three groups in the US who can get an adequate education in public schools—those whose parents can adequately teach the relative importance of the culture of education and the culture of entertainment, those who are motivated by grades, parental approval, etc., and those who are more interested in the math, science, language arts, and social studies that are taught in school, than in entertainment of one sort or another. If you want to examine my claim for yourself, listen to the content of kids’ conversations and compare the frequency of conversations about entertainment to those about politics.

I am of the opinion that no top-down mandate can solve such problems. I work in a school district that, depending on the year, educates students who speak 80 to 140 languages at home. Every teacher needs to become culturally competent with the actual students he or she teaches.

You will hear me say over and over that the most important relationship in education is that between each student and his or her teacher(s), and with the other education professionals in their school—including secretaries, cafeteria workers, custodians, and bus drivers.  The second most important relationship is between each teacher and the school principal, the person whom the teachers and other educators need to respect as an instructional leader.

Because there is no way to mandate culture, this is one area that teachers must have control over. Each school has a culture of its own, each classroom has its culture, and each student has a home culture. Without adequate resources, teachers and building administrators cannot address questions of culture, and the most important resource is cultural competence.

There is much more to say about culture, so I hope you will post comments if you have comments or questions.

Idea 2.1: Finland

Ever since I read, “The Smartest Kids in the World, And How they Got that Way,” by Amanda Ripley, I’ve been tantalized by the thought of a place where they are doing education really well. Now that I have interviewed my friend and colleague, Emily Crum, I can make so much more sense of all of the articles I’ve seen about education in Finland since that time.

The first time that we spoke after Emily returned from Finland, she said, “It’s not what you think. I’ll explain.” It was, however, what I had thought. Finland has decided to make teaching one of the most important professions in the country. The method is simple. They pay teachers a salary that means that the best and brightest are competing for the jobs; they give them the necessary instructional leadership, resources, and training to be the best possible teachers, then they stay out of the way as they educate their kids, because they trust their teachers. For those of you who are interested in details, I will do a wonky version of this blog—today I want to share just a few details—my ideal education is better than Finland’s. Of course, it will be a while before I spring my ideas on you, dear reader.

Emily told me that Finland knows how good their education is; they sell tours of their schools to those who want to see how their system works. She also said that she didn’t see anything happening in classrooms that is different than what happens in American classrooms—except that class sizes were optimum, student teachers often co-teach classes, supervised by fully licensed teachers who act as mentors—and that staff rooms had happy relaxed teachers in them. Finland uses a national curriculum, and she didn’t see much deviation from it. In my opinion, this is about as effective as traditional schooling can be, and the US could improve by adopting the core of the model—adequate resources for schools and world class recruitment, training, and support for teachers.

When talking about why Finland’s public education is so highly regarded, it is vital to mention that the Program for International Student Achievement, (PISA) a worldwide study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, (OCED) is the test that has for almost the past 20 years, compared the quality of education in school systems around the world. The Finns understand that the PISA is more a study of literacy than anything else—even the math section requires that you understand the story to solve the problem. Finnish is a highly phonetic language, so Finns learn to read more easily than American children. Also the popularity of foreign film and TV means that Finns are always reading the subtitles of their favorite entertainment. Further evidence for this is that PISA scores are dropping as more and more students come from immigrant communities who don’t speak Finnish at home. Even though things aren’t perfect in Finnish education, we could benefit from following their underlying strategy—paying for enough resources to effectively teach, insisting on the highest standards for teachers, and insisting that the untrained not meddle in public education.

Amanda Ripley also profiled the South Korean education system. It also produces high PISA scores but using a method that largely eliminates childhood. Students all know that their future is largely determined by a high-stakes test that determines where they will attend college. Students study night and day—in Seoul the police department has a special unit whose job is to enforce the midnight curfew for hagwons, so-called “cram-schools” where students continue their education in the evenings. Every night, the police raid at least one hagwon for holding classes after midnight.

What this tells us is that the scheme proposed by education reformers in the US can work to produce high test scores. Unlike South Korea, however, the US has totally inadequate mental health care for those who are chewed up and spit out by a system that so cruelly accomplishes the “objective” of educating students.

In the US, we ask students who speak other languages at home, those with learning disabilities, and those who have high ACE (Adverse Childhood Event) Scores, to take the same test that those with strong families and native literacy skills to take. After all, just as the PISA tests—not just literacy—but familiarity with the ideas and content of a particular sub-culture, the SBAC and PARCC exams do the same thing.

In a future blog, or set of blogs, I will delve into assessment and how teacher-driven formative and summative assessment gathers superior data, is exponentially less traumatic to students, and already produces better data than standardized testing—even without the teacher training that would help others trust the superior data that teachers can already generate.