race matters

Almost a year after Barrack Obama was elected president the debate about what his being the nation’s first biracial president means rages on. Simplifying and generalizing the arguments (always a precarious thing to do): some say it signifies a step beyond race to some place where we do not have to worry about it, where race has nothing to do with how we see and judge people; others admit the importance of Obama’s election, but also speak of the continued racism that people of color face and to statistics about the disproportionate number of people of color living in poverty, failing in our schools, suffering from toxins in their neighborhoods, sitting in prison, and generally dealing with the very real effects of institutional and systemic racism in our society.

In recent weeks the debate was inflamed by the arrest, in his own home, of noted scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who publicly asserted that he had been the victim of racial profiling. The arresting officer denied the idea and refused to apologize, saying he had no reason to do so. The president weighed in; the papers and talk shows are having a field day. Predictably and revealingly, in a poll, about 3/4 of African-Americans said they thought race was a factor in the arrest; 2/3 of whites said it wasn’t; it is the privilege of the over-class to ignore the world in which the under-class lives.

There is hardly a better moment to read Cornell West’s 1993 classic Race Matters. In essays entitled “Nihilism in Black America,” “Beyond Affirmative Action: Equality and Identity,” “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject,” and more, West incisively and profoundly analyzes racism in the U.S. His carefully constructed prose elucidates complex ideas and stimulates further thought. He speaks truth to power in a way that is both provocative and obvious, frequently making me wonder why I hadn’t seen his point before that moment.

Among many, the idea that stands out for me at the moment is that African-Americans are intrinsically part of our national culture. They’ve been on the continent almost as long as white people. Our society has evolved with the contributions of both black and white people. To the extent that there is a “white” culture and a “black” culture (categories that clearly include a great deal of variety and individuality within them), they have evolved together, contributing to one another in both many, many ways. African-Americans are as “American” as the rest of us.

It is obvious to me that, as the title to this book suggests, race still matters in the U.S. and around the world. The sooner that white people in the U.S. accept and publicly acknowledge this reality, the sooner we will be able to take true steps to equality.

fugitive days

In 1972, the year I entered 1st grade, the U.S. was still fully engaged in the Vietnam war. The movement to end the war was going strong, as well, and our society was searching for stability in the wake of the necessary upheaval created by the struggle for civil rights. The hippie counter-culture was in full bloom.

All this barely existed for me then, at six years old. No adults in my life talked about civil rights or the war or hippies in front of me that I remember. Certainly, none of my teachers talked about these things or discussed them in class. Everything about these events was shrouded and unspeakable, yet phrases and images punctured the veil: body count, free love, acid, red menace, Ho Chi Minh, Woodstock, Black Panthers, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, a young girl running naked down a Vietnamese highway—all these were part of the mythology, the background, however dark and incomprehensible.

The lack of information added to the mystery for me, made me curious. I wanted to know what was going on and, since it was clear that the adults in my life didn’t want to talk about it, I simply recorded the emotions and feelings and images and words that I could see and feel around me. That is to say, I remained mostly ignorant of history, of a time in our nation’s and our world’s history that I see now shapes much of our current world, especially the generation between my parents and me, people who are currently 55 to 65.

I’ve been meeting and talking to people from those days. They lived and struggled, believing in the portentousness of their era and the potential for changing the world. They felt that revolution was upon them, that the world might be fundamentally different next year or next month or next week or maybe tomorrow.

During the last several years I’ve begun doing social justice work within the educational system. I consider this work a continuation of the movement and ideas from the 1960s and 1970s and I’ve been trying to learn from their triumphs and failures how best to make my work effective. (Further, I think we as a nation and a world need to learn from those times—considering our nation’s involvement in Afghanistan an Iraq, I’m afraid we aren’t.) I’ve been trying to learn about middle and upper class white people (people like myself) and how they tried to work in alliance (or not) with working class folks, poor people, and people of color. They saw the fight against the war as tied up with the civil rights movement and also with rejection of the dominant culture. With hindsight some of their work and perspective was self-serving and did not overturn the system as they hoped. They were, as we all are, trapped in the systems in which we live; destroying those systems is, while a good goal at times, perhaps not always realistic or even entirely positive.

It was in this context that I began to read Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers memoir about coming to the anti-war movement and the progression toward building and planting bombs in buildings, claiming credit for them, and publishing manifestos proclaiming the injustice of the war, calling attention to the genocide propagated in Vietnam, and demanding its end. I was looking for insight, for understanding of how and why someone comes to decide that blowing things up seems like the right choice. I wanted to know how he felt about it now. Did he feel that their actions helped achieve their goals?

I found some of what I hoped for, though not enough to be satisfied. Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations. It may be too much to ask Ayers for profound wisdom and help with my own strategic decisions; the events may still be too close, too personal, too raw. Whatever the case, a lot of the book feels unfocused, rambling, jumbled, even confused. To its credit the book feels very real, real enough to be uncomfortable for me, who clings tightly to my rationality and the idea that I always have options. I want to stay connected to the worlds I know.

For me that is the real lesson. Ayers paints a world in which blowing things up became the only option, a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances. He and his cadre of friends and allies disappeared down the rabbit hole, putting themselves in a world where there were no other alternatives if they were to remain true to their principles. That is a very difficult place to be.

I never read a memoir without feeling the sense of self-indulgence and solipsism. This one in no exception and, in particular, it is a little like a trip through temporary insanity; only when Ayers begins to emerge from it, toward the end of the book, do I start to feel comfortable. He pulls back at the last and I get a little of the perspective for which I hoped. Along the way, I also got a lot of stories about living in those times, about fighting the police, about arguments on campuses and in basement rooms, about the sexism and racism and classism that still challenge our movements and society. It is not a great book, but I’m glad to have read it. May we all learn a little from it.

bridging the class divide—and other lessons for grassroots organizing

Linda Stout has a vision of a United States in which the air and water and land is clean, in which neighbors of all cultures and ages have real community with each other, in which everyone has a job they want to do and the unpleasant jobs are shared, in which every child is cared for and fed, in which every person has good health care and access to good education, in which every person, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, or any other “difference” is respected and fully part of society. In this vision the media provide information from all viewpoints and everyone participates in a democracy with real opportunities for all to share leadership. It is a great vision.

Perhaps you have a vision like Stout’s. If so, you are not alone—and Stout might ask you: “What are you doing to make your vision a reality?” If you answer that you have no power, that you’re uneducated, poor, don’t know what to do and too busy to do it if you did, she might tell you her story. Stout grew up in North Carolina in a working poor home—a 10’ x 40’ trailer with no running water. Her mother was permanently disabled in a car accident at age 30, but got nothing in compensation because they were unable to hire a lawyer to help them with the legal process. Stout did well in school, at first, but after being belittled by her fourth grade teacher her grades suffered and she was tracked away from college throughout her middle and high school experience. Nevertheless, she did find her way to college, but discovered her “working-class English was not acceptable” there. Even though she knew she did good work, she internalized the idea that her way of using language was inferior and she lost much of her confidence to speak publicly or write. Despite all this, Stout helped found one of the coolest, most effective social justice advocacy groups in the nation (the Piedmont Peace Project—PPP), now speaks powerfully to large audiences, and has written a book, along with numerous press releases and other work.

Bridging the Class Divide is part personal journey, part grass roots organizing handbook, part appeal for national and global social justice, part treatise on what a real movement for real, permanent change looks like. Stout’s deceptively simply prose structure displays a depth of experience and commitment that rivals anyone anywhere. That depth gives the book its power and accuracy, consistently hitting every target at which she takes aim. And, as she discusses PPP’s model for social change and organizing, Stout always illustrates her ideas with concrete examples from the work.

Stout identifies barriers between classes and how to overcome them. She delineates seven principles for organizing:

• Focus on social change.
• Work across race and class lines.
• Include indigenous organizers and leaders.
• Encourage diversity with ongoing outreach and training.
• Focus on connections between local and national issues.
• Develop and maintain personal empowerment while working for organizational power.
• Be flexible and ready to create new models to adapt to needs and leadership styles of participants.

She redefines leadership as a “survival issue for people of color, women, and low-income communities.” By Stout’s definition, leadership can be learned and shared by every person and “the reward of leadership lies in giving what you’ve learned to others.” She assumes that every person wants to be a leader and gives them opportunities to grow, while still providing support.

Stout discusses how to use the media effectively, how to budget and plan, and how to take care of an organization’s staff. She talks about the need to be prepared for backlash; serious opposition is proof that you’re beginning to succeed in your work—from slashed tires to bad press to family pressure against community leaders, you need to be ready to respond calmly and appropriately.

The book concludes with a call for a unity group, across organizational lines, working for change at every level. Only by bringing us all together with the common vision of a better world for all humanity can we bring the necessary masses together to make the world we all want. “Working together will be the hardest challenge we will face. Much harder than facing the opposition or working alone. But it is the only way we will win. It is the only way to create revolutionary change.”

the mismeasure of man [sic]

Stephen J. Gould is one of the finest writers on science I have read. He writes clearly and thoroughly about both the technical details of science and its larger philosophical issues. When his analysis of the history of attempts to measure human intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man, was published (1981), it was an almost instant classic. In it he exposes the bias inherent in the studies of intelligence and ranking, focusing primarily on the logical and statistical flaws, though he also spends time on the cultural and political contexts in which such errors flourished and on the bias—cultural and linguistic—in the tests themselves. Almost without exception, he writes with a humility about science and its possibilities, while still affirming the need to try, that I find refreshing and helpful in a world that is too often filled with disciplinary arrogance.

Technically, this book is about biological determinism. Although there are many versions of biological determinism, the idea is essentially that one’s genes and the biology with which you are born determine your potential. Another way to think about this is that biological determinism is primarily about limits for a person’s growth: according to this argument, a baby’s physical being creates a maximum for how smart he/she can ever be, how talented she/he can ever be, and to what socio-economic class he/she can ever rise. I hear the ghosts of biological determinism when students say things like “I’ve reached my math limit” or “I’ve gone as far as I can in math.” Indeed, there is a fairly common belief that people either have math ability or they don’t and there’s no changing it no matter what you do, but I have seen no research to back up that idea. And this kind of idea is not limited to math ability; it’s often applied to all kinds of mental and other abilities.

Gould “seeks to demonstrate both the scientific weaknesses and political contexts of determinist arguments.” He places deterministic thought within the Platonic tradition in which it belongs, but his message is not that determinists were evil or even always wrong, but that science is a “social phenomenon, a gutsy human” act of creativity, filled with “hunch, vision, and intuition.” For Gould and for me, science is an imaginative process of understanding and explaining the world, a process in which we try to, and sometimes succeed, in come closer to the truth, but that—because we are human and because this creative process is cultural bound and culturally influenced—does not always bring us closer to the truth. Gould criticizes “the myth that science is itself an objective enterprise, done properly only when scientists can shuck the constraints of their culture and view the world as it really is.”

One of the large themes in the book is the error of reification: the conversion of an idea into a concrete object. A good example of this in our every day life is the idea of love. Most of us have ideas about what love is and how it operates in the world, but I don’t think anyone would suggest that love is a concrete object that can be measured or assessed. Rather, it is an idea we use to describe certain feelings and events and commitments. The biological determinists Gould describes try to reify intelligence by turning it into a unitary object that can be measured through tests of what we have learned to call IQ. That intelligence is more complex and interesting than that seems obvious and good to me, but the attempts to measure human intelligence are numerous and continue today.

More than that, once we have a number attached to intelligence, we can rank people and groups of people, and that is precisely what was done. Cranial capacity, IQ scores, and other supposed measures of intelligence were used to rank people—and with unsurprising results, considering who was doing most of the measuring: middle-class, white men came out on top and other gender, racial, and class groups fared less well.

If you read the book, you’ll find the details of many of the historical attempts to measure and rank intelligence, starting in the 19th century and up to the 1970s, along with a broad view of the scientific and political contexts of those attempts. It is a fascinating and cautionary tale—and one with a positive message, at least in my mind: humans and our endeavors, including science, are complex and full of potential; that we cannot accurately measure that potential means that our limit is not known.

In Professor’s Model, Diversity = Productivity

Claudia Dreifus published a provocative article and interview with Scott E. Page in the NYTimes in January. His book is The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies (Princeton University Press). In the interview, Page explains that, together with Lu Hong—an economist at Chicago’s Loyola University—he

constructed a formal model that showed mathematically that diversity can trump ability, and also when it does. . . . What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.
The other thing we did was to show in mathematical terms how when making predictions, a group’s errors depend in equal parts on the ability of its members to predict and their diversity. This second theorem can be expressed as an equation: collective accuracy = average accuracy + diversity.

I am leery of the predictive power of mathematical models in the world. Furthermore, I haven’t read this book and can’t speak to its readability or to the quality of the research in it. I do think the ideas expressed in the article are worth talking about. It’s a good addition to the national conversation on these issues.

pedagogy of the oppressed continues to be relevant and revolutionary

In his forward to Paulo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Richard Shaul writes, “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process” (emphasis in the original). I take this as a given, and it is important to make this assumption explicit and to call attention to it in a time that is seeing increased emphasis on the “outcomes” of education, as well as increased calls for standardization of those outcomes. Standardized goals for students and schools imply a neutral standard and process that applies to every student, every teacher, every administrator, and every school or college. I maintain that such standardization is illogical and ill-considered. Further, standardized outcomes are ethically wrong, because they perpetuate the inequities and injustices of our already unequal educational system and society. Racism, sexism, classism, and other systems of oppression continue to be strong forces in our government, in our schools, in our jobs, in our doctor’s offices, on the streets—indeed, in every aspect of our lives. This does not mean that we should have no standards at all; nor does it mean that we should hold different people to different standards—that is yet another form of injustice. It does mean that we should understand our standards as situated within an unjust system and that we should work together with our students and the people in our lives to create standards that make sense in each situation and time. One standard does not apply in all situations.

Published in 1970, Freire’s book of political, philosophical, and, pedagogical thought is (unfortunately) still seen as revolutionary—and it should be, because, if taken seriously and incorporated into our educational system, Freire’s ideas would help dismantle the inequities and systems of oppression that underpin our society. The book is a complex and at times dense read, but mostly because it is so firmly rooted in the context of his time and place. Freire was born in 1921 in Brazil to middle-class parents who were greatly affected by the 1929 world depression. Thus, the young Freire learned first-hand about poverty and injustice. Right after World War II he began to espouse a form of liberation theology and became involved in adult literacy education, partly because being able to read was a condition for permission to vote. He continued the work into the early 1960s, but in 1964 a military coup forced him to leave Brazil and he did not return until 1980. So, even though Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published (in Spanish and English) while Freire was in the U.S., its spirit, its philosophy, and all its examples are of Brazil and his work there.

I will not attempt to summarize his arguments here, but I want to bring out, and hopefully clarify, one important point of misconception about Freire’s dialogical method and about Critical Pedagogy, which is greatly influenced by Freire and his work. In addition, I briefly want to discuss Freire’s attempt to synthesize theory and practice.

The misconception about Freirean thought I hear most often seems to be about the difference between an approach or philosophy of teaching and a method of teaching. By my reading, Freirean pedagogy is definitely an approach, not a method. What he discusses and advocates for is a way of engaging students and teachers in a process by which they problematize and grapple with the world in which they live. How that is done is not proscribed—only that it is done. Naturally, engaging with our world and with each other often involves discussion—dialog—but Freire does not preclude lecturing or any other teaching style. He asks only that any teaching method be in the service of the goal of helping students and teachers to process and name their world, thereby creating and understanding that world more fully for themselves.

When people suggest that Critical Pedagogy is only about students teaching themselves and others, is only about group work, is only about discussion and never about lecture, they are limiting Freire’s “dialogical” process to literal dialog only. That is, they are focusing on dialog as a method, rather than as an approach or philosophy. There are no magic pills that will make every classroom great and every teacher perfect. There is no one way to help all students learn and succeed; to look for one is folly. Freire knew that and so does every teacher who is honest with himself or herself. Instead, Freire tries to provide a philosophy that will promote the success of every teacher and every student everywhere, because it provides a framework for each classroom to define itself and its relationship to the world and to the subject it approaches.

Having talked to a lot of teachers, I feel safe in saying that most teachers do not have a consciously developed philosophy of teaching or careful theory of dialogical or democratic pedagogy (if you disagree, I’d love to hear about it). This is true even for the many teachers who practice Critical Pedagogy or variations of it. For Freire, this is a form of “activism”—“action for action’s sake,” to the “detriment of reflection.” The opposite extreme is “verbalism” or talking and reflection “deprived of its dimension of action”; verbalism turns words into “idle chatter . . . into an alienated and alienating ‘blah.’” For Freire, neither end of the spectrum is adequate or even good at all without the other end; true education, real liberation, and genuine revolution is the synthesis of theory and practice. Only “reflection and action” or “praxis” can truly transform reality; praxis is the “source of knowledge and creation.”

Thus, Freire argues for the necessity of theory, that we put that theory into practice, and that we then reflect on our experience to modify the theory and/or form new theory. Those of us who practice our teaching without a coherent, explicit philosophy, take note.

As the book’s title suggests, oppression and how we might combat it is a central theme in the book:

This, then is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. . . . Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity.

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own “effort,” with their “courage to take risks.” If others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the “generous gestures” of the dominant class. Precisely because they are “ungrateful” and “envious,” the oppressed are regarded as potential enemies who must be watched (emphasis in the original).

[T]he pedagogy of the oppressed . . . must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (emphasis in the original).

These are important words to remember. They are also remarkably relevant today and in the United States. I see the truth of these words in the privilege and power I possess, in the values that our consumer culture espouses, in the continued oppression of women, people of color, and of all people who vary from the normative “ideal” in whatever way. I see it also in our foreign policy, as our government continues to treat most other countries—especially those populated primarily by non-whites—as potential cheap labor sources, natural resource wells, markets in which to sell our products, and/or potential threats to our possession-based culture. The rhetoric has literally been “they want what we have” and we must protect ourselves from that “threat.”

It is a sad fact that Pedagogy of the Oppressed continues to be relevant and revolutionary. At the same time, I take inspiration from its message of hope and possibility. I try to make my teaching a part of the solution for our community and our world.

how it works

More excellent commentary on math and gender bias from xkcd.

As usual, thanks to my friend and former roomie, Alisa, for the heads up.

race, class, gender, and John Edwards

Bill Fletcher has some interesting thoughts about John Edwards’ campaign and the way it fell prey to ‘white populist error.’ Read more at ZNet.

class of 64 followup

[Click here if you want to see the original "class of 64" post.]

The results are in for my Intermediate Algebra class:
64 students
38 passes (59%)
26 not passes (41%), including 6 drops (9%)

If we take the drops out of the base we get the following:

58 students on the roll at the end of the class
38 passes (66%)
20 not passes (34%)

10 As (17%)
13 Bs (22%)
15 Cs (26%)
8 Ds (14%)
12 Fs (21%)

(Note: the D/F percentage does not add up to the not passes percentage because the numbers have been rounded.)

First, some positives: 9% drop/withdrawal rate is pretty good, especially for a math class that is not for majors. Similarly, a 59% pass rate for those who started the class is better than the historical average for intermediate algebra sections at my college. Further, a 66% pass rate for students in the class is around the community college national average; since intermediate algebra is a pre-collegiate course, which generally have a much lower average pass rate than other courses, this pass rate is very respectable when compared to other classes like it.

On the other hand, we’re talking more than 2 of every 5 students who started my class didn’t pass. Even of those that stayed on the roll, 1 in 3 didn’t pass. That is not acceptable to me. My assumption is that every student who tries and who doesn’t have some life crisis during the semester should pass.

A surprise was waiting for me in the demographics: the pass rate for women (21/32) is almost identical to that of the men (17/26). That’s surprising because in the past, women have done better in my classes than men. The racial breakdown is, unfortunately, more predictable. 78% of white students passed, with white women passing (7/8) significantly more than white men (4/8). The gender disparity in white students was made up for by the Latinas, six of whom passed out of nine, as compared to Latinos (4/8)—59% overall pass rate for Latina/os. Only one-third of my African American students passed (1/1 men and 1/5 women), while 70% of Asians passed, split evenly between men and women.

The $64/64-student-question: Could I have made a difference with some of the students who didn’t pass if I had fewer students in the class? My heart says yes. The numbers tell a different story—aside from the new gender parity, the results are very similar to most of my classes. This leads me to three possible explanations:

• Because of conscious and/or unconscious factors, I make grade distributions turn out about the same regardless of the number of students.
• There are other systematic and/or structural issues that lead to similar outcomes no matter the number of students in the class.
• I can teach 64 students as effectively as 34 students.

I don’t know which of these, or what combination of them, explains this semester’s results. And whatever the case, the issue becomes one of workload. In effect, I taught two sections of intermediate algebra during the last semester. The fact that they happened to be in the same room at the same time did little to mitigate the number students’ names and stories I needed to know or the amount of papers, quizzes, and tests I graded every night. The wear and tear on me, the number of late nights or very early mornings, the anxiety from always having the grading hanging over my head—all this is not sustainable.

I’m back to the conclusion that I can’t let it happen again—not if I want to survive semester after semester and year after year and continue to enjoy the same or better success. And fewer students would give me more time to work on other parts of my teaching, improvements that might help some of those students that are currently not passing.

So, how will I prevent classes from getting so large while still giving students the power to choose to be in my class? I don’t have an answer about which I’m entirely happy. Next semester, I’m going to experiment with a modified version of my system, whereby coming to class and doing the homework moves students up the waiting list; I will cut off the roll somewhere around 40 or 45. Still too many.

We are working in a system of scarcity—in this case educational—in which those that can afford to pay can get more attention, more support, and more access to higher paying jobs; those that can’t afford to pay, rarely get the same attention, support, or anything else. We continue to recreate this system. My little attempt to move away from a scarcity model worked in that the students who stayed in the class succeeded at the similar levels to those in other classes. But the personal cost is too high. Individuals can’t do it alone. It will take institutions, governments, and societies to move away from a scarcity model to one of access and plenty. I am hopeful, but not optimistic, about the possibilities for this kind of change to ever happen. Hoping and working for change, sometimes paying a personal price that is too high and sometimes not, is all I know to do.

the secret to raising smart kids

In this Scientific American article, Carol S. Dweck reports that “more than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is the key to success in shcool and in life.” Of course, effort requires time and so I think we are forced to look at the ways that our societies structurally create time for some groups of people (usually the dominant groups—white men in the U.S.) to focus effort on their school work, jobs, and other measures of “success.” Class issues also come into play because of the way that more money usually translates to more time to concentrate your efforts. Add this to the other benefits of being in the dominant groups in your society and it’s not hard to understand, yet again, how dominant groups remain dominant. Every system is exquisitely designed to reproduce itself.

This article also made me think again about the debate between some teachers in the blogosphere have had concerning whether or not to give homework. If effort and discipline is what makes the real difference in student success, then I believe the balance is tipped toward giving regular homework. Of course, I leaned heavily that way to begin with, so I’m probably not the best judge of the implications of this article’s findings for that debate.