Hope for the Future, Peace for the Present

Hope for the Future, Peace for the Present

“I am proud of the people from the community who have come out to say they don't want this anymore. There are people who are marching right now to bring calm to our community. There are people who want so much for there to be peace and to protect the values of our community. There are people who want so much for there to be peace and to protect the values of our community. I'm proud of them. I'm also very concerned because what I'm seeing is not -- it is just not acceptable. And I shouldn't -- went to one of the elementary schools near the -- in the western district, Gilmore elementary school this morning, and talked to some fourth graders. And the first question the young lady asked me is why are people trashing my neighborhood? I didn't have a good reason -- I didn't have a good answer for her. It is so frustrating that people think that this makes sense to destroy our community, when we know that those people who live there that are already hurting, are going to be the ones that pay for that.”
                                                                                                (Stephanie Rawlins-Blake, Mayor of Baltimore, 2015)

 

The April Riots, started by teenagers, called into question how such large sections of the population could become so disenfranchised in an era of increasing social connectedness. Yet, teachers have witnessed the development of a disenfranchised and even subversive population since the implementation of increasingly standardized models of education within public schools. These models diminish the role of socio-cultural norms and aspirations of local communities for those of a nationally dominant socio-cultural group, whose discourse is increasingly controlled by corporations. The creeping inequality of the past is now a tidal force of disparity as evident in the enduring struggle of schools to close the ever widening Achievement Gap.

While Delpit revises the Achievement Gap as an Opportunity Gap, the realities of identifying what the gap truly represents, why it needs to be closed in order to provide stability and how this can be accomplished remain ever present.  As a social institution, the school must begin to address the varied ontological approaches toward education within modern pedagogy in order to reconcile the dissonance between formal and informal cultural perceptions of ‘teaching and learning’. Only when the gap between societal needs and communal needs are bridge, then can the public education system begin to truly address these disenfranchised youths. As it was during the mid-1800’s, so public education must remain, “the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery” (Mann, 1848, p. 92).

            The effect of the great balance wheel will be marginal if the gulf between the formal institutionalized culture of public education and the informal social culture of the communities the system is serving continues to exist. The extent of the Achievement Gap within communities in transition will be examined in order to demonstrate the breadth of the problem using the data from a school transitioning from one demographic to another as evidence. Then the work of three educational philosophers will be reviewed so that the public education system can bridge the gap between the conception of ‘school’ as a social institution and ‘school’ as a communal one. First, John Dewey explains what must be done; return the focus of the ‘school’ to the interest of the ‘community’ over the corporations. Second, Paulo Freire provides a reason why this must be done; to empower the marginalized and oppressed to claim their education. Third, Jerome Bruner creates a methodology explaining how this can be accomplished through the use of local ethnographic research to examine the ontological relationship between formal and folk pedagogy. Finally, the distinction between ethnological approaches in education and the misguided application of culturally relevant pedagogy will be examined.

Baltimore, like many other urban centers in the Rust Belt of the post-industrial American landscape, is a proving ground for social practice. Indeed, the Northwest corner of Baltimore city, along the county line, is experiencing a social melding as residents from Baltimore’s Westside move up and out into the county to pursue the American dream. The schools at the forefront of this migration must now face the realities of chaos, uncertainty, and violence many experience on a daily basis. This difference between cultural paradigms is captured in the “Achievement Gap” evident among students.

Pikesville High School is one school straddling this shifting paradigm. Recent data trends published by MDReportcard.org and Baltimore County Public Schools, Data Warehouse demonstrate that a disproportionate number of African-American students failed to meet various requirements for graduation, testing (SAT and HSA), and attendance. Pikesville High School currently has 881 students enrolled (Pikesville High School, www.bcps.org, 2014), with 45% African-American, 40% White, 8% Asian, 5% Hispanic/Latino, and 2% Two or more Races (BCPS, Data Warehouse, 2014). While African-American students comprise the majority of the population, a disproportionate number of African-American students experience delayed graduation with only 82.68% graduating in four years, when compared to 91.75% of the White population, 91.67% of the Asian population and 100% of the Hispanic/Latino population. Although overall graduation rates rose across the school, among African-Americans the graduation rate actually fell by nearly 7%. (BCPS, Data Warehouse, 2014)

There is further data to demonstrate the discord between the needs of the school and that of the community. According to 2013 SAT data published regarding student performance, there are major discrepancies between the performance of African-American students and students of other races, particularly White-students. Beginning with participation on the SAT, of the 71% of students who took the SAT in 2013, 100% of the Asian population and 84% of the total White population sat for the SAT, compared to only 55% of the total African-American population and 40% of the total Hispanic/Latino population who took the SAT. This data shows a strong correlation among variables, such as attendance affecting African-American performance on standardized tests even beyond the SAT, including AP-exams (BCPS, Data Warehouse, 2014). African-American performance on the Advance Placement Exams is much lower than the performance of students from other backgrounds. Only 8% of African-American students enrolled at the school participated in AP-Exams, compared to 31% of Asian students and 50% of White students. Among the African-American students who took the AP-Exams, only 58% passed compared to 72% of Asian students and 79% of White students. (BCPS, Data Warehouse, 2014).

With such strong a correlation between racial background and performance on standardized tests, other questions arise regarding the cause of this disparity. The reality reflected is not necessarily one of academic ability, but rather availability of opportunity. This data represents the reality of the opportunity deficit at Pikesville High School, and the distribution of African-American students across ability groups, with few African-American students enrolling in GT or AP-classes, few African-American students identified as Special Ed., but large numbers of African-American students enrolled in various entitlement programs. African-American students at Pikesville High School are not necessarily facing an Achievement Gap as such, but more an Opportunity Gap (Ladson-Billings, 2013, p. 105) perpetuated by continued ontological and socio-cultural distance between the socio-cultural norms of the school and those of their communities.

According to Delpit, African-American students do not enter school with equal levels of opportunity as their peers, particularly White, because of relative socio-cultural differences. These cultural differences are often marked by more than stark distinctions in clothes, custom, and habit, but by varied discourse styles, language, and ontological dissonance between the formal culture of social institutions and the informal one of the community. An example of the effect of these cultural differences is when a teacher often mistakes difficulties with code-switching between dialects as difficulties in reading and writing (Delpit, 1995, p. 58). When the socio-cultural norms of the community clash with those of the school, the Opportunity Gap is widened further (Delpit, 1988, p. 292). If these socio-cultural differences are unaddressed, “we are left with only an abstraction…an inert and lifeless mass” (Dewey, 1897, p. 78) who is foreclosed from reaching any meaningful achievement.

John Dewey would rail against the proliferation of standardized testing, blatant corporate insight and overreach in the modern American school. In fact, Dewey would argue that the same policies and programs currently in place to address the needs of marginalized groups are actually marginalizing them further by increasing social isolation. “[Schools] when separated from the interest of home and community” (Dewey, 1916, p. 108) by distance, whether socio-cultural, or geographic, increase the isolation of social groups. This isolation decreases the free mixing of groups within society, and creates further disjunction. As corporations continue to see education as a burgeoning market and schools as consumers, the needs of communities go overlooked because the public education system seeks for solutions from without rather than from within. Attempting to ‘buy’ a way out through the purchase of licensed curricula products rather than examining the communities in which the school is embedded, only serves to create distance between the school and its stakeholders. The isolating distance between institution and community creates “rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life…[promoting]…static and selfish ideals within the group” (p. 108). In this way, industry bleeds into social life, and dehumanizes those who fail to meet the industrial criteria for success.

In place of a prefabricated curriculum implemented in a top-down bureaucratic structure, Dewey suggests that both teachers and students learn best from experience. The teacher, and indeed the school, must return the focus not on ideals and targets set from without, but on those set from within the community. Free from the shackles of bureaucratic oversight, teachers must be able to function autonomously in order to be loyal to their own experiences as they meet the needs of the students placed before them. Teachers must be given the time and opportunity to generate meaningful educational experiences that authentically engage their students. According to Dewey, learning can only occur through authentic educational experiences that promote the reciprocal exchange between intrinsic change within the student and extrinsic change beyond the student. Although this may be achieved with a purchased curricular aid, the “moving face of an experience” (Dewey, 1938, p. 113) is not equal among all students, but requires the involvement of the teacher to personalize the experience based on the conditions of the student, the family, and the community. Therefore, the educator must be able to “judge what attitudes are actually conducive to continued growth and what are detrimental” (p. 113). This requires the teacher to weave the classroom experience into the socio-cultural context of the surrounding community to facilitate the construction of knowledge through personal connections made by students. The specific contextual requirements of experience-based, constructivist learning are not entirely incompatible with a top-down boxed curriculum; however, the task becomes more difficult the more marginalized the community the school serves. As Freire would warn, this further perpetuates the marginalization of a community, ultimately feeding a repressive system. 

From Paulo Freire’s perspective, the public education system becomes a dehumanizing and oppressive entity when it acts on the needs of the institution over the needs of the student.  An education system not focused on the needs of the communities it serves becomes an “exercise of domination [stimulating] the credulity of students, with the ideological intent…of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression” (Freire, 1972, p. 201). Essentially, an educational system imposed from the top-down only seeks to satisfy the needs of those at the top at the expense of those on the bottom. Students are rewarded based on how well their performance matches the expectations of the dominant group, not how their performance empowers them to succeed. Such an approach is “necrophilic” (p. 200) and seeks to overwhelm, control, and oppress in order to maintain a static, stagnant, society. This approach predominates corporate and industrial thinking that seeks to perpetuate the means of their own success. When this corporate consciousness invades the public institutions the actions of individuals and their participation in social life is reduced to simply an “illusion…[where they] only submit to and become a part of those who act” (Freire, 1972, p. 200). In other words, the powerless are separated by their worth to those who are in power. When this occurs in schools, large sections of populations are alienated because their socio-cultural background does not fit the one sanctioned by the corporations, industries or institutions. Oppression is a natural product when the public education system as a social institution defines itself by the demands of industry and capitalism over those of the community and local society.

Education from a corporate, industrial, capitalistic perspective becomes a commodity to buy and trade. From a corporate perspective, education, like all other commodities, follows the economic principles of supply and demand. These principles categorically exclude segments of the population from having an education based solely on availability of capital and profitability to the corporate entity. When schools return their focus to meeting the needs of their students and communities, agency will shift back to the student. This shift will turn students from “objects of assistance” (Freire, 1972, p. 204) to “critical thinkers” (p. 204). Students will be able to “develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they [will] come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transition” (Freire, 1972, p. 204). In other words, they will regain hope. Without hope, what else do students have left to lose?     

Instilling hope for a future that is better than the present is the real mission of education. This is the way “[the great] balancing wheel of social machinery” (Mann, 1848, p. 92) works to create stability. John Dewey described what schools must do to operate at their best, focus on the community and the students. Paulo Freire articulates why schools must serve the community, in order to liberate the oppressed, and create authentic hope for future change. Jerome Bruner explains how this can be accomplished through reimagining the school as not only a social institution but a cultural one as well.

As an institution, the public education system strives for lofty ideals, but is often mired in the political reality of reflecting only one life-way and culture among many. As Bruner suggests, the educational institution will not be able to make any significant changes until it reconciles the dissonance between its formal institutionalized culture and that of surrounding communities. Bruner states that “education is not simply a technical business of well-managed information processing, nor even simply a matter of applying “learning theories” to the classroom or using the results of subject-centered “achievement tests”. It is a complex pursuit of fitting a culture to the needs of its members and of fitting its members and their ways of knowing to the needs to the culture” (Bruner, 1996, p. 43). As a social institution, the public education system must accept the fact that it is a cultural one as well, whose primary role is to act as a cultural-informant that bridges the distance between dominant and marginalized social groups. The inability to perform this role is what is being perceived as the Achievement or Opportunity Gap.

Beginning with the individual, Bruner suggests that each child be warmly invited to participate in a separate culture created by the school that intentionally bridges the reality of the family with that of society. Bruner states, “My counsel is not that we throw children in over their heads [as is the case now]. It’s only that we should give them an opportunity…to enter the culture with awareness of what it is about and what one does to cope with it as a participant” (Bruner, 1996, p. 82). Teachers must become ethnographers in order to act as cultural-informants for their students. This can only be accomplished by focusing the effort of the school squarely on the community, and integrating as part of the community.

Turning to integrate into the community, the school, and its participants must seek to become part of the community. They must seek to actively engage with members of the community in order to better understand the socio-cultural context in which meaning is made, and identity is derived. Experience within the community will provide teachers with insight into the pedagogy of the surrounding community. Bruner calls this culturally-specific pedagogy “folk pedagogy” (p. 44). At a cross roads between the psychological and cultural construction of meaning, understanding the ‘folk pedagogies’ of a community will enable a teacher “to situate…knowledge in the living context that poses the “presenting problem,” to borrow a bit of medical jargon. And that living context, where education is concerned, is the schoolroom—the schoolroom situated in a broader culture” (Bruner, 1996, p. 44). Not only will this provide the individual teacher insight into the student, but it will also validate their role in the community as communal-participant and meaning-maker. Enhanced cultural insight will allow participating members of the school community to be aware of the messages hidden within pedagogical choices. This is important because as Bruner states, “Pedagogy is never innocent. It is a medium that carries its own message” (Bruner, 1996, p. 63) to which students are inherently attuned.  

While in comparison to Dewey and Freire, Bruner appears to be taking a microscopic view of education, he is merely expressing in exquisitely fine detail the function, importance and level of interaction a school must have in order to connect with the community. The conception of a school as social institution when reduced to its essence is primarily about the relationships and exchanges between three entities: family and student, student and student, and student and teacher (Gastaldi, et al, 2015, p. 103). Bruner’s conception of the teacher as ethnographer and folk-pedagogy as a vehicle for creating cultural meaning across social groups presents a distinct difference from current applications of culturally relevant pedagogy   By lumping students into vast cultural/racial groups, such misapplied culturally relevant pedagogies leave teachers teaching to little more than national caricatures of each student based on racial stereotypes and sweeping generalizations rather than individual, social and community specific realities. Schools must move beyond the “heroes and holidays” (Lee, at al., 2007) approach and must be willing to conduct ethnological research in order to truly examine the cultural ontology, learning relationships and folk pedagogies within specific communities. This examination of ontology must attend to the reciprocity and relationship among all parties invested in the successful education of the nation’s youth, with particular attention to the student-teacher relationship. The nature of this relationship should be viewed as a cultural artifact that embodies the cultural appropriations of dichotomous power/authority structures and exchanges within a perceived social hierarchy.

In the aftermath of the April Riots, the citizens of Baltimore, of Maryland, and of the nation faced the ugliness of a reality so easily overlooked. Teenagers on their way home from school, obsessed with the notion of a purge (after the movie starring Ethan Hawke), where the poor would rob from the rich to redistribute wealth and balance society, held a city in their grasp. As they looted and burned their neighborhoods, they released the violence and chaos many experience privately across a national media landscape for public consumption. Those in positions of power and authority seemed surprised by the lack of respect for law and order, and the willingness to commit violence demonstrated by the city’s youth. Many educators and police officers were not. We know firsthand the price that must be paid when a social institution created to instill hope and serve the most vulnerable is corrupted and becomes a model for oppression in service to the power-elite. When the job of teaching becomes tied to tests and not to students, the schoolhouse becomes new ground for venture capitalists and not humanitarian outreach, and students are judge based on their current corporate worth and not the value of an undetermined future, there is no way out. Hope still exists, teachers must rekindled it student-by-student. The public school’s mission for the 21^st century must be to reach into the community, heal the wounds from the inside out, and remind every student that they are more than the sum of their test-scores.

.

             

             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References:

Baltimore County Public School (2014) Profile of Pikesville High School, Data Warehouse,
            https://www.bcps.org/schools/profiles/pikesvillehs.pdf

Bruner, J (1996) The Culture of Education., Cambridge, MA, and London, UK., Harvard
            University Press

Delpit, L. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people's
            children. Harvard Educational Review, 58(3), 280--299.

Delpit, L (1996) “Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom”. New York: 
            The New Press

Dewey, J (1897) “John Dewey: My Pedagogical Creed”, The School Journal, Volume LIV,
           Number , (pp. 77-80)

Dewey, J (1916) “Democracy and Education” In T. Johnson & R. Reed (Eds), Philosophical
            Documents in Education (pp. 105-110). Pearson Education Inc, Upper Saddle
            River, New Jersey, 2012

Dewey, J (1938) “Experience and Education” In T. Johnson & R. Reed (Eds), Philosophical
            Documents in Education (pp. 110-119). Pearson Education Inc, Upper Saddle
            River, New Jersey, 2012

Freire, P (1972) “Pedogogy of the Oppressed” In T. Johnson & R. Reed (Eds), Philosophical
            Documents in Education (pp. 196-206). Pearson Education Inc, Upper Saddle
            River, New Jersey, 2012

Gastaldi, Longobardi, et al. (2015) “Parent-Teacher Meetings as a Unit of Analysis for Parent-
            Teacher Interactions”  Culture & Psychology, Vol. 21 (1) 95-110,
            DOI: 10.117/1354067X15570488, SAGE Publications Inc.

Ladson-Billings, G (2013) “"Stakes is High": Educating New Century Students” : The Journal  
            of Negro Education, Vol. 82, No. 2, The 33rd Annual Charles H. Thompson   
            Lecture, pp. 105-110

Lee, Menkart, Okazawa-Rey (2007) Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12
            Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development, San Francisco, CA,
            Teaching For Change

Mann, H (1848) “Report No. 12 of the Massachusetts School Board” In T. Johnson & R. Reed
            (Eds), Philosophical Documents in Education (pp. 196-206). Pearson Education Inc, 
            Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 2012

Rawlins-Blake, Stephanie (2015) “Press Conference of Maryland Governor Larry Hogan” 
            Originally Aired April 27, 2015 - 20:00ET, Anderson Cooper 360              
            http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1504/27/acd.01.html, accessed 11/21/2015