Street roots., May 09, 2014, Page 9, Image 9

Street roots
9
May 9, 2014
CLASSROOMS, from page 8
Imagine you are a speech writer for
President Bush. Write the introductory :
paragraph of a speech to coalition forces
after their victory in Iraq.”
S.Z.: W W ?
B.B.: Now here’s the deal: This is the
adopted textbook in supposedly liberal, :
green Portland.
It also has three paragraphs on climate
change and essentially blames poor countries
as the reason that there hasn’t been
progress made-on reducing greenhouse gas
emissions. This is partly what happens when
a community is not engaged in helping to
shape thé curricülùm of the schools. Though
this certainly doesn’t reflect the politics of
Portland, this is the official curriculum that
is offered to our students. How does that
happen?
S.Z.: That’s what I ’m wondering. Oregon
has adopted the Common Core (a set of
educational standards adopted by most states).
The time line suggests that this will all be in
place by 2015.
B.B.: No one really knows what the
Common Core is going to do. There are
people who like the Common Core, there are
people for whom the Common Core is a
liberation from the much more narrow and
rrote standards that they were dealing with
before, and so it feels like a good thing. Until
the. tests hit, nobody knows what the
Common Core means.. That is where the
standards will be known; hot in the standards
themselves, but in how they are assessed.
And so we’ll just have to wait and see what'. /
the Common Core means here, or anywhere.
S.Z.: I saw a piece in The Washington Post
recently that called out mega-textbook
corporation Pearson because its sister non-profit
was funneling millions of dollars fraudulently
intoPearson. I
B.B.: Pearson is huge. They made
something like $9 billion in sales last year -
and that is who we’re trusting to be the
knowledge keepers for our children. And
that’s a problem.
So you’ve got Pearson, you’ve got
Houghton-Mifflin and you’ve got McGraw-
Hill. You’vé got this handful of giant
corporations who are in charge of what our
students ought to learn. And that’s a
problem because they have an interest in
what children ought to learn and what they
shouldn’t learn.
They shouldn’t learn to ask too many
questions, they shouldn’t learn to critique,
they shouldn’t learn to think that anything
might be wrong with the capitalist system. B
They shouldn’t think about change being the
product of social movements. There are huge
silences in corporate curriculum.
S.Z.: Comedian Louis C.K. came out last
week with a Twitter rant about his children’s ;
experience with the Common Core. He has a lot
of sway with a large swath of Americans.
B.B.: Yes, I was encouraged to see Louis
C.K.’s critical tweets about the Common
Core, and how his kids used to love math and
now it makes them cry. As Diane Ravitch
pointed out in her blog post about this, Bill
Gates has spent hundreds of millions of
dollars writing and pushing the so-called
Common Core State Standards — and bribing
education organizations to support them. But
increasingly, parents, teachers and school
principals are organizing against Common
Core, and especially the tests used to assess
them. In fact, the Oregon Education
Association just passed a resolution
denouncing the Smarter Balanced tests that
the state of Oregon is trying to bring in to
bully teachers to teach to. And parents
throughout the country are opting their
students out of taking the tests. Who knows
how all this will turn out, hut the organizing
shows that just because wealthy and ,
powerful people want something, doesn’t
mean that it will happen.
S.Z.: What does it take to write and produce
and teach good curriculum?
B.B.: You know, that’s a good question, it
takes a measure of freedom. Teachers have
to be able to talk with one another but also
be able to imagine and to create and to test
it out in their classes. It takes collaboration
it takes a commitment to seeing one’s work
as a part of an effort to make the world a
better place.
S.Z.: How then to get these more relevant
curriculums into the hands of the teachers? ’•
B.B.: There may be some places where
curriculum cops are coming into the
classroom and are looking at the board to
see whether or not some prescribed lesson
is being taught, but actually teachers have
some freedom to find alternatives.
The corporate curriculum is so bad and so
narrow and so one-sided that it doesn’t even
live up to its own claims. It’s not balanced. It
doesn’t offer multiple perspectives.
So when the Zinn Education Project
comes along and offers, for example, a role-
play oh the U.S. war with Mexico, it’s
something that a lot of teachers gravitate
toward. Instead of reducing (the fesson) to
the United States and Mexico, it includes
perspectives of women in occupied New
Mexico, Mexican soldiers defending Mexico
City, the Apache whose land was being
fought over by the U.S. and Mexican *
soldiers, and the abolition movement. It’s
more participatory, it’s more fun to teach,
it’s fuller and it just engages kids in ways
that having them read a passage in the
textbook and answer Some questions at the
end doesn’t do.
One of the things that I do in my U.S.
history class, is ask, “Who was that guy who
they say discovered America?” And every
h an d will go up. “C h risto p h e r C o lu m b u s.”
And then I ask Who did he discover, who was
here? And a few students will say Indians and
I’ll agree, büt what particular nationality?
What were their names? Nobody. I’ve never
had any students say the Taino. And I’ll say,
isn’t that interesting? So we all know the guy,
the name of this fellow who came from
Europe, but none of us knows the names of
the people who were here first What does
that say?
To offer them the fact that they have been
given a one-sided history is powerful. It’s
important tó not only teach a moré accurate
history, but to point out the inadequacies of
the version they have learned via corporate
textbooks.
S.Z.: You co-authored a piece with Bill
McKibben addressing climate change. The
future seems pretty glum.
B.B.: My little piece of this is trying to
offer teachers the resources and the
encouragément and the nudging to teach
about the climate crisis in their classes. This
is- not really a part of the curriculum by and
large because as I mentioned, this textbook
- t h e only social studies textbook about the
world — that kids have here in Portland has
three paragraphs on the climate crisis. The
second of which begins: “Not all scientists
agree with the theory of the greenhouse
effect...”
S.Z.: (Laughter) Unbelievable. Because some
scientists are paid by ...
B.B.: Yes. So this is the work of the
environmental justice movement of the
climate movement and educators together:
that we have to shake things up. This is the
greatest crisis facing humanity and we need
to be alerting students and getting them to
think critically about what has created this
crisis and who is benefitting from it and who
has an interest in our not doing anything
about it.
For me and for Rethinking Schools, our
charge is pot just to pound the desk and to
say we’ve got to be doing this, but is also to
be finding teachers who are doing this work
and give them a forum to share their
experiences.
This is all of our work. I’m inspired by the
work of Bill McKibben and as a grandpa/1
don’t know what the future holds, b u t! know
that we don’t have a right to say, “Well, we’ve
lost.” Hope is different than optimism. I may
riot be optimistic, but I have to be hopeful.
. And educators and activists working together
can make a difference.
_ I don’t know if I shared with you what I
discovered teaching about coal: Scholastic f
partnered with the American Coal
Foundation to produce a curriculum for
fourth graders called “The United States of
Energy,” singing thé praises of coal. /
Now. this is Scholastic. They should know
better. They were hired and given who knows
how much monèy by the coal mdustry. This
curriculum was sent to tens of thousands of
teachers around the country and was filled
with all of the “advantages” of coal. There
was not a single mention or moment ip the
curriculum that dealt with any of the
problems with coal. Nothing on mountaintop
removal coal mining, nothing on the coal
miners, nothing on the
climate crisis^ nothing
on mercury, nothing
on asthma and lung
disease and heart
attacks.
C orporations h a w an
We blew the whistle in terest in w hat c h ild re n
on this curriculum.^
oug ht to le a rn and w hat
wrote a critiqué of it
for Rethinking Schools they shonldn^t learn« They
and we partnered with shoBM n|ft le a rn I© ask to©
the Campaign for a
m any questions^ they
Commercial-Free
s h o u ld n 't le a rn t© c ritiq u e ,
Childhood and then
they sh o u ld n 't le a rn to th in k
brought in a number of
th a t a n y th in g m ig h t be
environmental justice
w ro n g w ith -th e c a p ita lis t
groups: Greenpeace,
the Center for
system« They s h o u ld n 't'
Biological Diversity
t h i n k a b o u t change b e in g
ancldexnanded ,feat^
the p ro d u c t o f s o c ia l .
Scholastic sever ties
with the coal industry. movements« There are huge
silences la corporate
The New York Times
picked it up and then
curriculum «
they wrote an editorial
on it critiquing
Scholastic for its bad
judgment.
Scholastic cried
“uncle” and agreed to pull down the
curriculum and to apologize for this
partnership. Of course they had all kinds of
other partnerships too. They wrote a
curriculum — a terrible and manipulative
curriculum that they did for the U.S. ,
Chamber of Commerce — that had energy
politics similar to that of Dick Cheney. The
thing is, these guys just have so much money
and for a group like Scholastic, I imagine it is
quite tempting to take the enormous sums of
money that the Chamber of Commerce and
the coal industry and Exxon and everybody
¡ >
else has to throw around.
S.Z.: Che of the reasons for this nationally
standardized curriculum is to bring low-
achieving children up to the achievement level
of other students. It strikesme that this is
certainly hot the way to do that. The irony is,
America’s issues with education have more to
do with childhood poverty than learning
standards.
B.B.: It’s so hypocritical. If you rèally care
about poor children, if you really care about
the academic achievement of poor children,
then let’s Start with raising the minimum
wage tô $15. And let’s actually, seriously pay
attention to poverty and inequality; let’s pay
attention to kids’ lives. But let’s also take
seriously the learning conditions of kids.
When I was teaching in Portlandj a high
school teacher taught five classes. Now, a
high school teacher teaches six classes. They
have more kids. If you really cared about kids
and achievement, you would do more than
just say, “We have higher standards.” You’d
actually try to put more resources into the
conditions of teaching and learning - not to
mention the conditions of their lives.
S