TF: Education is an investment not viewable in terms of outlay to return. Return may be immediate but more likely it's long down the road. Privatized schools discussions let a group of "experts" run a system usually starved for funds. Those experts are never cheap. The Corporate State says an elite cadre runs the world better than the masses. The master race manages affairs better than locals. Centralized thought and management is so pervasive Repugnicrats fall for solutions like privatized schools.
SF: Education is an investment in the future. Our next generation, our next set of social goals, our next century.
TF: No way around the presumption that EDUCATION TODAY COSTS MONEY, with all the capitalist baggage today's money entails.
SF: Think what POSITIVE legislation we want to enact for schools in today's society, designing legislation to strengthen public schools rather than prepare them for corporate receivership (charter schools etc) or let them abjure the task of educating everybody (ending social promotion, requiring standardized graduation tests, etc) or narrow public schools' mission to force facts into heads while denying full realities of culture (standardized testing, Proposition 227, etc)
TF: You can't legislate reality any more than you can legislate morality but that doesn't stop society from trying.
SF: Just because you can't legislate morality doesn't mean there can't be morally good legislation.
TF: Granted the State budget for public education is 40% of the total general fund but money can't buy love and education is in the toilet.
SF: Can't we do any GOOD as legislators?
TF: In education I have my doubts. Teaching is quality not quantity. It matters not how many students get PhDs but how many learn complex life skills in a complex world. Cynicism aside, politicians didn't make that world any easier for the rank and file.
SF: Schools must do several things:
1) clarify what to teach to whom, by reference to circumstances of humanity. Teach students at their own pace, preparing them for a real-life future we can reasonably expect as individuals and communities. Instead we deliver a tremendously large standardized educational product to a consumerized student, mass developed in the Industrial age. In the post modern information
revolution, learning must be spatial and total. Multimedia teaching tools barely scrape the surface of true classroom dynamics. Has anyone looked into the flash fire of distant learning technology over the Internet?
2) use the student community's cultural strengths: even before Proposition 227 schools were desperate to forcefeed non-English speaking students into an English-speaking (classist, racist, consumerist, viciously heterosexist, ethnocentrically ignorant) reality lacking many of the virtues of immigrant communities to which these students belong.
3) teach CRITICAL education rather than inculcating values.
SF: Look at the absolute as opposed to relative amount spent. There's a marked absence in quality control.
TF: That doesn't break from the assembly line paradigm? Look at the emphasis on quantitative vs qualitative reasoning.
SF: Compare Compton with Beverly Hills and tell me money doesn't count in public schools.
TF: The issue is delivery of quality not quantity of educational product. It's more than repackaging the product that's necessary, at the eve of a global revolution in thought and deed, as well as realization of a world community where for the first time America must become an integral part and not the dominant or sole player.
SF: We need talk in school on maintaining as sense of national purpose and consensus. The public school system still inculcates our sense of self and self worth. I don't think THAT should change!
TF: Schools should maintain a sense of national purpose and consensus.
SF: Around what? Nazi Germany had a sense of national purpose and consensus. I'm sure that's not what you're talking about here. Or around the current form of consensus, the one complicity with the corporate status quo?
TF: That's not what I had in mind. Even a cursory glance at the 2000 national election debacle indicates we lose national consensus, on which it's essential to govern whatsoever. I point to this sense of national purpose with concern.
SF: Greens could devise legislation to improve the NUMBER of real learning experiences for children by, for instance, increasing the NUMBER of high-quality books available to them. Anyone else on this forum want to suggest possibilities?
TF: In a culturally diverse, pluralistic society you advocate this would be even harder to gain consensus on than the older white society dictating dominant values and beliefs for the last 150 - 200 years.
SF: Only a consensus arrived at critically, through serious testing of concepts to be accepted, will avoid the possibility of arriving at a consensus that isn't Green.
TF: That was precisely my point, but in your response I see little effort to break away from the assembly line paradigm dominating Western education since the mid 1800s.
SF: False dilemma. School systems are quantitative. Government must create a system where a certain NUMBER of students have a certain NUMBER of learning experiences through a certain NUMBER of educational tools.
TF: I presume this reiterates the call for vouchers, charter schools, and corporate bean counting in school systems. Strong resistance to this form of K-12 education consumerism is it's the bane of poverty pockets and inner city school systems losing their tax base and funding with white flight to suburbs, truly a MONETARY issue dealing with NUMBERS.
SF: Pay attention. I already presented the decisive argument AGAINST vouchers on this forum. Stop presuming things you don't know.
TF: I must have missed the dialogue. I don't get to read everything coming in over the wire. You could sum up your position.
SF: Yes, which is why we should take an interest in what we invest and what return to realistically expect, given that we invest what we invest.
TF: We invest in our children and THEIR future, not capital outlay for an assembly plant.
SF: As Dickens pointed out in Hard Times education for 150 years was largely mass production. It's possible that an education that wasn't mass production might require a DIFFERENT (not necessarily more, or less) outlay of funds.
TF: My objection was not a non sequitur, but yours looks like it! I'm sure we'd all like to know what separates THAT from the assembly line paradigm.
SF: A silly non sequitur objection. If we fund schools by blowing soap bubbles at them would this break away from the assembly line paradigm? If you recommend the Monterey Language Institute's Immersion system as the model for teaching all limited-English ability students, we'd like to know what separates THAT from the assembly line paradigm.
TF: If they're not prepared with skills to develop their talents, what's the purpose of formal education? Society's investment in the process is to promote continuity and capabilities to assume responsibilities of functioning in an adult world. Would you have them not so?
SF: Schools' role is not to reshape society but to prepare students for their roles in it, not to produce sheep conforming to roles deemed necessary for them.
TF: I must be getting dull. John Dewey said, "All life educates and formal education is only a small part of it." Let's talk about the thousands and thousands of mind numbing, brain-deadening junk children are forced to absorb as TV acts as a surrogate baby sitter/ parent their first 6 years? Schools can't be the social monitor for a dysfunctional society. Has anyone looked into the flash fire of distant learning technology over the Internet?
SF: This sounds too much like training students for the Age of Bill Gates. If that's what society's interested in, Bill Gates can pay for it. You read it here, he can pay for the WHOLE THING if that's what it amounts to.
TF: We're already in the world of Bill Gates. What do you think you're typing on?
SF: Just because I use a computer doesn't imply that I SHOULD necessarily subsidize Bill Gates.
TF: The recent fad of critical thinking and teaching across the curriculum aside, revolutionary systematized analysis of society generally speaking, is sill reserved for post graduate education.
SF: I support what Theodore Sizer calls habits of thinking. In his book Horace's School he writes: Some people don't see schools as engines of information and intellectual liberation. They find the latter, especially when so described, to be intolerable. Schools, they insist, are to teach young people what is true, what is right, what is wrong. Anything beyond that is anathema. Their argument is seductive but flawed, especially when one gets to schooling beyond the rudiments.
TF: You don't learn it all at the first day of school. Critical thinking is a process, not a function, taking years to develop. That's not to say we shouldn't start in primary grades but you can't expect much success before secondary or post secondary education sets in.
SF: Those finding this latter approach wishy-washy and dangerous prefer schools teach THEIR definition of truth at the expense of that of presumably misguided others. They fear teachers who use their authority to force students to adopt other opinions, or at least keep open the possibility of other ideas winning out. The bigger fear for all of us, though, is students may have no opinion at all.
TF: Some opinions are superior to others. In a democracy freedom of thought and action come out ahead of respect for authority and duty.
SF: This is precisely what happens in our schools because snotnosed adults who run things don't think it's appropriate to teach students to think critically.
TF: In teaching history I solicit students to develop moral conclusions and create their own standards of values to evaluate human action. At elementary level or secondary levels teaching cross curriculum is repressive.
SF: There's too much information to purvey and choices to make. Right and wrong are, however much we may regret it, uncertain in most important matters. Should schools teach a particular kind of certainty or teach the craft and habit of deciding for oneself on merits?
TF: The school day is limited. Teachers must choose between curriculum and agenda.
SF: Whether we employ the best teachers to teach the best system is arguable.
TF: I started teaching over 15 years ago as a tutor. That doesn't make you an authority on the Politics of Education I thought we set out to discuss. I don't mind your promoting your own successes but you might consider in this dialogue that there are other pedagogical paradigms than bilingual education, equally important to crafting a life of the mind and preparing students for their roles in society.
SF: I have a PhD with an ethnographic dissertation supervised by an ethnographer.
TF: I have four degrees. I find it burdensome to mention it.
SF: Which course in cultural anthropology do you recommend? Which inner city wisdom were you going to share?
TF: I recently relocated here. I lived in San Jose my whole life. After 50 years in which at one point or another I was held at knife point or at the wrong end of a loaded gun, witnessed muggings, robbings and stabbings - some in broad daylight - I have a good idea why the story of urban blight will be that of mass exodus in the 2000s. I decided at a point of destitute existence to live rather than be liberal and left.
SF: This reiterates the one size fits all argument. What's good for the military is good for Juan. Do they train kindergarteners at MLI? Are they busy teaching children to read in English when they don't speak English and don't read Spanish yet?
TF: My mother taught primary grades. You learn alphabet and numbers in first grade. Reading proficiency comes in third grade or so.
SF: Did you learn to read in a foreign language before you learned to read English?
TF: To preschoolers English is as foreign as any other language before you learn it. Have you forgotten Freud's Tabla Rosa model?
SF: I'd like to know how it's done.
TF: I have friends trying to force it on little kids this year.
SF: No, actually it's changing. In California whites are a minority and huge portions of California are primarily Spanish-speaking. Ever visited south Pomona recently?
TF: You don't listen to someone talking to you, and only hear what you're prepared, programmed, to listen to. I specifically drew a distinction between demographic racial differences and a CULTURALLY white society. Have you failed to absorb Inner City sociology or a basic Cultural Anthropology Class to attune you to the very, very important DIFFERENCE? Cultural pluralism and multi-culturalism does not lend credence to a the disappearance of the anthropological FACT of cultural domination, across the globe and the FACT of acculturation within and between two or more, rival cultural systems.
SF: Pomona where I work is closer to the inner city than Mammoth Lakes.
TF: The rest of society takes a much broader, redefined attitude toward race and ethnicity than your ethnocentric definitions.
SF: Large portions of California, growing larger and larger each year, are an essential BROWN culture, where Spanish is needed for good jobs.
TF: Good jobs like flipping hamburgers, busing tables, construction. UPWARD MOBILITY, discounting International marketing, where any language other than English could be an asset is still largely English speaking in the Western world.
SF: Writing copy for Univision, selling cars, insurance, anything you name. There's plenty of moneyed Spanish-speaking people here. Come visit someday and see.
TF: Your list is restricted to sales jobs. Life in the corporate world requires immigrants and natives to speak a common idiom to work as a team. There's over 100 dialects spoken in Los Angeles County right now, is that not true? That doesn't mean we teach in all 100 does it?
SF: The basic problem at hand in coping with English-learning students is the more instruction they receive in their primary language the more stable and successful they'll be in learning English.
TF: I don't see that that follows. Does proficiency in French or German, lets not pick on just Spanish, make me more proficient in Algebra or Geometry?
SF: The more bilingual education, the more successful the bilingual student.
TF: Patent evidence of ESL in our schools the last two decades would deem this assumption absolutely false unless you concede most primary grade teachers for the last two decades were incompetent at the dual role of ESL and standard language requirements in crowed classrooms. Pete Wilson ended that reasoning.
SF: A lot of the failure attributed to bilingual education is the failure of not enough bilingual education.
TF: No like I just said, and supra, bilingual proves to the satisfaction of the people of California to be a failure. See my comment on the Monterey language Institute.
SF: Look up STAR test results of San Francisco and San Jose Unified School Districts, where bilingual test-takers scored better than monolingual ones. Find out about successful bilingual educational programs at Calexico, Santa Ana, Ontario. Maybe you'll wonder why the NO ON 227 campaign refused to discuss bilingual education directly. I certainly did. Don't ignore the complete mismanagement of the NO ON 227 campaign. The campaign wasn't a fair fight. Those defending bilingual education chickened out and sold out the state in the process, a main contributing factor of California's choice. Don't ignore the media's miscarriage of the process. Meanwhile everyone bought into Ron Unz's lies. These links I cite as evidence:
Graph from Thomas & Collier's 1997 study. Sorry I didn't cram it into the first post.
Stephen Krashen's more moderate approach carefully documenting flaws in present law.
Krashen's discussion of how learning to read transfers across languages
Tomorrow I substitute-teach in a genuine bilingual program. Parents signed the waivers and all! Yay!
TF: Read Drucker. Establishment take on community in The Community of the Future, contrary to your approach. Society takes a broader, redefined attitude toward race, and ethnicity, than your ethnocentric definitions. Open your mind to other people's attitudes. Art and science should well be inculcated in schools in the next century.
SF: I don't know what you're talking about. Ethnocentric definitions? Mind specifying a definition I've given? Mind outlining Drucker's redefined attitude? I assumed as an educator you were making an effort to instruct and enlighten. To that I also assumed data you offered defined your position and views. Were that not the case I and perhaps others were misled. Rhetorical strength of my posts is I'm straight with readers about evidence I present.
TF: Too much hyperbole to deal with. Say it in simpler terms and you'll be understood.
SF: Shortsighted WHITE school districts are segregated through their narrow-minded refusal to train students for anything better than monolingualism. Worst off are students put in sheltered English immersion programs under 227, trained to speak Spanish poorly while learning English poorly.
TF: They're not trained to speak Spanish poorly. Who says the English Immersion program is directed solely against Spanish? The Monterey Language Institute run by the military is based on the Immersion system. It's the best way to learn a language.
SF: English-learning students show a long-term learning deficit among students who learned English in school without learning how to read in their primary language.
TF: I'm no linguistic expert but I understand the spoken language of the native tongue is learned alongside, not integrated with, English or whatever. Proficiency in one has no corresponding relationship to proficiency in the other.
SF: The basic problem in coping with English-learning students is the more instruction they receive in their primary language the more stable and successful they'll be in learning English. The more bilingual education the more successful the bilingual student.
TF: At least in this country for some while to come. I didn't say white society I said culture. With all respects I don't think it will change soon.
SF: We need to let ALL students enjoy the virtues of a multilingual, multicultural, RATIONAL education to make CONSIDERED cultural choices and NEGOTIATE the multiplicity of communities they confront in real life.
TF: Which sense of community are you talking about? The global community is multi-cultural. The Urban community is basically politically dominated by an English speaking thinking bias. What are we preparing for? I don't think even in mass consumerism taking over everything from the media to the Internet, you want to globalize EVERYTHING. Surely some things are sacred and parochial?
SF: I don't mean to pry, but I have to ask where this question is from. Do you live in a multicultural community? Do you have friends who are first- or second-generation Farsi, Mexican, Nicaraguan, Colombian, Fulani, Japanese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Dutch?
TF: I'd like to get back to a discussion of the POLITICS of education instead of this digression on linguistics.
SF: Can't we prepare for a POST-CONSUMERIST society rather than just a reflection of a status quo we assume to last forever?
TF: The problem, as Martin Luther King said, is after you segregate the learning process the student become adult has to integrate into a essential white culture at least here for some while to come. I didn't say white society I said culture, which I don't think will change soon.
SF: Nothing lasts forever even the Nation State, also a product of the Industrial Age, to which I say good luck.
TG: I support most of Sam's ideas. Teachers I talked to who are involved in bilingual education support Tim's (Sam's - sic ??) stance. I read that literacy in their primary language is essential to become literate in a second language. Immersion programs you promote at the Language Institute in Monterey works well for adults interested in learning the language and stay immersed in it, or when one child speaks another language and must learn a new language quickly to communicate with peers. This model breaks down when the only immersion they're exposed to is in class when the teacher uses only English and students revert to their primary language on breaks, recess, lunch and at home, not exactly immersion. It doesn't work unless you HAVE to learn the new language to communicate.
TF: Refreshing to discuss REAL policy on the net, maybe start a trend!
TG: As an RN considering changing professions to teach, I'd like to continue this interesting, passionate expressive discussion but would like to see it resume mutual respect for all participants.
TF: I didn't want to get drawn into a dialogue about pros and cons of linguistic practices, but into the politics of education. What you say seems right until I consider what schools produced with 1900's immigration wave. Perhaps we lost sight of our original genius.
TG: These kids have people they communicate with in their primary language. Many get frustrated when forced to try the new language with little perceivable gain.