Dear Commons Community,

Thousands of people, led by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, have been protesting the pipeline, which would carry crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois en route to the Gulf of Mexico. The route is adjacent to the Standing Rock reservation, and the tribe and climate activists say the line risks contamination of the tribe’s water source and its construction has damaged, and would further damage, sacred sites.  As  reported by Reuters:

While clothing, food and money have been pouring in from all over the world, the Dakota Access Pipeline Donation Fund requests more donations of wood, blankets, winter sleeping bags and propane to help weather the winter.  

A division of labor keeps many active, with campers volunteering in the four kitchens, shoveling snow, building tents and doing myriad other tasks.

The multitudes at the camp defy the predictions of state and local officials, many of whom said out-of-state protesters would flee south like migrating birds. Children can be seen sliding playfully down nearby hills while senior citizens gossip over fire pits.

“It’s a scare tactic, saying it’s too cold to be here,” said Gemma Akins, 36, a Reiki healer – a form of stress reduction – from Colorado.

North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple issued an evacuation order for the camp earlier this week, citing the weather. That followed the Army Corps’ earlier decree to vacate the camp, which is on federal land, by Monday. The state is not going to enforce that order, and voluntary compliance doesn’t look likely.

“I have zero experience with the cold,” said Jess Weiner, 29, of Los Angeles, who arrived Thursday. “But I love the adrenaline of being here.”

It’s not clear how much money has been raised to build and sustain the camp since it was founded last spring, but estimates stand in the millions of dollars. The protests started attracting more attention in the late summer, particularly after clashes between activists and private security hired by Energy Transfer Partners, which is building the line.

The Obama Administration has twice delayed approval for ETP to tunnel the pipeline under the Missouri River. This one-mile stretch is the last unfinished spot on the line in North Dakota.

The Three Affiliated Tribes of the MHA Nation, another large American Indian tribe in North Dakota, earlier this fall funded portable toilets, food and garbage removal. Even though they have earned billions from the extraction of oil and gas from their lands, the MHA have supported the Standing Rock protest.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness (ICPH) has released a data report analyzing how many homeless students are enrolled in public schools in New York State, where in the state they reside, and how they perform in school compared to their peers. 

Highlights from the report:

• There are more than 145,000 homeless students in New York State.
• There are 5.3 homeless children for every 100 public school students in the state.
• In New York State, 83% of homeless students live in urban areas up- and downstate.
• New York has the highest percentage of homeless students in the U.S.
• New York has the second largest homeless student population in the U.S.

Homelessness across the U.S. is increasing, with more than 1.3 million homeless children and youth in the 2013-14 school year. It disproportionately impacts children and families.

“We cannot afford to ignore the complex and unique challenges faced by homeless children and their families,” says Dr. Ralph da Costa Nunez, President of ICPH. “Unless we enact common sense public policies that address the educational and economic needs of homeless families, today’s homeless children may become tomorrow’s homeless parents.”

Homeless students are too often overlooked by policy-makers when talking about education policy. Improving outcomes and supports for homeless students reduces the burden on teachers, parents, and schools who struggle to help students cope with the trauma of homelessness along with the challenges of poverty. ICPH also published a related report on factors influencing high school graduation among homeless students in New York City. It is available here.[r20.rs6.net]

Homeless children has evolved as one of the critical social issues in urban America.  Our public schools are major safety nets in helping to provide a little hope and caring for them.  Thank you ICPH for helping us not to forget them.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Education Week has an article (sent to me by Maryann Polesinelli) speculating on whether Donald Trump will help or hurt the school choice movement and especially charter schools.  While he is a major proponent of charter schools, his campaign comments and put-downs of minorities, women, and people with special needs have him in the crosshairs of most urban Democrats, some of whom such as Andrew Cuomo, support charter schools.  Here is an excerpt:

“School choice advocates are waffling between excitement for potentially unprecedented new opportunities under a Donald Trump administration, and concern that the president-elect could also dramatically undermine the school choice movement.

Trump’s promise on the campaign trail to spend $20 billion on school vouchers for low-income students could herald a massive expansion of school choice—especially with his selection of an ardent school choice activist as his new education secretary. But the election’s polarizing outcome and Trump’s comments on race could also prove corrosive to the school choice movement’s increasingly tenuous claim to bipartisan support—in particular for charter schools.

More than half of the nearly 6 million students enrolled in the nation’s charter schools are black and Latino.

“It seems highly likely that there might be some increase for the federal [charter school] program. … We would applaud that. The problem is almost everything else,” said Shavar Jeffries, the president of Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee that supports charter schools and teacher merit pay.

Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos, a Republican mega-donor with a long record of championing vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and charter schools, also brought mixed reaction from the school choice community.

Jeffries expressed guarded optimism because of DeVos’ record of support on charter schools, but called on her to “push the President-elect to disavow” the bigoted and offensive rhetoric he used on the campaign trail toward racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.

“If charter school policy becomes primarily identified with Trump and his agenda, that could undermine the political viability of charter school policy with progressives and people of color for a generation,” Jeffries said….

But while Trump’s support may lead to major investments in school choice, some of his other policies, such as a nationwide stop and frisk program, and his comments on ethnic and religious minorities, could also poison the idea among key groups of charter school supporters and some Democrats.

This is an especially sensitive issue for charter school advocates, who carefully guard the movement’s status as a bipartisan issue.

“I think it feeds a narrative that choice is about privatization and conservative values,” said Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

She’s concerned that while promoting his school choice plan, Trump was too harsh in describing traditional schools in urban districts.

“The support for charter schools relies on bipartisan support especially in big cities where choice is probably most needed,” Lake said “The people we work with are always treading a careful political and rhetorical line.”

It’s an issue charter advocates have had to wrestle with a lot lately, as the sector has taken some hard political hits.”

It remains to be seen how this evolves but money ($20 billion) may “trump” urban Democratic loyalties.

Tony 

Dear Commons Community,

Nicholas Lemann, professor of journalism and dean emeritus at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, has an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education today promoting a new methods-based core curriculum.  He seeks to move away from an elective, Canon based system to one that emphasizes skills development.  He proposes eight one-semester courses as follows:

Information Acquisition

Google is a life-changing tool that we all use, but it doesn’t overlap perfectly with one of the core methodological skills of college students, which is locating usable information. To do that well, one has to know something about the sociology of knowledge — that is, who creates information, under what conditions, subject to what distorting pressures. It is pretty easy to cure students of the idea that everything they encounter online, or elsewhere, is true; a more challenging and important task is communicating a basic typology of information (academic, documentary, journalistic, governmental, crowdsourced, and so on) along with the idea that information isn’t cleanly divided into true and false, but is instead created through constant contention and revision. Some of the purpose of this course would be to give students a basic user’s guide to higher-education study: how to use libraries and online databases, how to distinguish among a multiplicity of sources, especially online, and how to perform a basic literature review. The kind of assignments that might go with this course would ask students to write a basic summary of what’s known about a subject, or to adjudicate between two widespread conflicting claims.

Cause and Effect

This is something like a course in the basics of the scientific method, aimed at people who aren’t necessarily going into science. The core thinking process entails stating what question you’re trying to answer, then establishing a hypothesis as to what the answer might be, then finding a way to test the hypothesis by gathering material that would settle its degree of trustworthiness. The title of the course refers to the idea that causation is a key concept in almost all fields of inquiry, which is too often used sloppily or instinctively, with unfortunate results. One could teach this course using primarily scientific examples, but that isn’t strictly necessary; for years, I have been teaching a version of it to journalists, using news stories as the main material. What might explain, for example, why violent crime has decreased so much more in New York City than in Chicago? What’s important is conveying the idea that making inferences is a skill, and that a series of thinking techniques is powerfully helpful in performing it.

Interpretation

The focus here is on close reading of texts, a fundamental academic skill that students may have missed in high school, that they will need to succeed in college, and that will also prove to be both practically helpful and emotionally enriching as they go through life. There are a number of ways to teach it from different disciplines, which could fruitfully be combined in the course: literary reading, analytic reading, and so on. Therefore this course could have elements of an English class, or a social-science class, or a class in law or religious studies. The main idea is to learn to read for meaning, for subtlety, for contradiction and ambiguity, and for connection to other texts. Some of the same skills could potentially be applied to material from film or drama. Assignments in this course would be traditional analytic papers, whether on the full meaning of a biblical passage or the governing principles embedded in the U.S. Constitution.

Numeracy

I am persuaded by the broad argument that the political scientist Andrew Hacker makes (talking about elementary and secondary school rather than college) in The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions (The New Press, 2015). For purposes of general education, not the specific education of people going into fields that require mathematics, colleges should require undergraduates to take a course that familiarizes them with the quantitative world. It is deeply present in just about everything, including not-obviously-scientific realms like politics and government. This need not be a math course per se. Hacker suggests pulling examples out of everyday life that illustrate the broad applicability of being able to think confidently about numbers — poll results, sports statistics, stock-market indicators, government economic data (these examples are mine, not Hacker’s). The idea is to make students understand how numbers are generated, how to compare quantities from different realms, and some of the basic concepts underlying probability and statistics.

Perspective

Most people, including students entering college, believe that the world as it appears to them and the people around them is the world as it is. It is crucial, and not easy, to teach people that they actually have a particular perspective, which inescapably has its limits — and then to help them understand that other people experience the world profoundly differently, which ought to be understood rather than dismissed. This project is central to a number of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, literature, psychology, and even the client-oriented aspects of professional education, any of which might be brought in. Courses on diversity or understanding other cultures would have some overlap with what I am proposing, but I worry that those sometimes take the edge off the complexity and difficulty of the subject by communicating the idea that through tolerance, respect, and understanding, a person can successfully adopt a benign, universal perspective that can honor all other perspectives. That’s appealing, but it’s important not to let students believe that their own viewpoint can ever escape being limited in important ways, or that fundamental conflicts between perspectives can ever be entirely avoided.

The Language of Form

The course title is a slightly modified version of a term that the digital humanist Johanna Drucker uses in Graphesis: Vis­ual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014). She focuses on how we increasingly get our information in the form of visual displays rather than texts or numbers. She explores mainly a deep understanding of charts and graphs, which are ubiquitous in the life of every educated person, but the method could be extended to the third dimension so that questions of how space and volume are arranged could also be considered. This course would have elements of design, architecture, planning, art, and even ecology. I want to distinguish it, though, from “design thinking,” as promoted at the Stanford d.school and elsewhere, which understands design not as encompassing everything visual and volumetric, but as more specifically about the process of making things. This should be a course in intelligently seeing and producing visual information, not in prototyping products and training people to plan and iterate projects in teams, which is useful but less universal than what I have in mind.

Thinking in Time

This, to some extent, is a course on the historical method, but it’s meant to do more than teach people to do historical research per se. To most students arriving at college, the past often seems safer than it actually was, outcomes more inevitable than they were, and operative assumptions closer to the ones we use today. Historical thinking is a powerful way of opening people’s minds to unfamiliar possibilities and ways of thinking, a process central to a liberal education. It can make students see that everything could have turned out differently, that individual people always operate within social, economic, and cultural contexts. One could teach such a course by focusing on a period in history, but that wouldn’t be strictly necessary, and the primary aim would not be to teach students the procession of significant events in a particular time and place. Similarly, it would be a good idea to study original historical documents in this course, but that’s a means to an end, not the end itself.

Argument

Back in the 19th century, when undergraduate core curricula were the rule rather than the exception, practically everybody had to take a course in rhetoric or oratory. The requirement often had roots in the colleges’ original mission of training ministers, and it usually vanished with the advent of the elective system. This course would aim to revive the tradition by teaching students how to make a compelling and analytically sound argument, both written and spoken (and probably also, inevitably, in PowerPoint). It is an endeavor with centuries of interesting thought behind it, so one can imagine the course drawing on philosophy, law, theology, even drama — with the opportunity to consider exemplary arguments from the past. It should be obvious that the assignments would ask students to practice the skills the course is teaching them, in writing and in performance.

Lemann concludes by stating that “what these courses have in common is a primary commitment to teaching the rigorous (and also properly humble) pursuit of knowledge. They therefore go against the grain of assumptions that are widely held in higher education today, including that entering students don’t need such a high level of direction, and that the idea that one can be taught to get closer to the truth of a situation is too problematic to justify a tight embrace. They put methods above subject-matter knowledge in the highest place of honor, and they treat the way material is taught as subsidiary to what is taught.”

This is an interesting proposal and one that I would love to see debated in college curriculum committees and faculty senates.

Tony