Close Encounters with the Blob
SKINNER, DAVID
Close Encounters with the Blob The educrats are still going strong. by David Skinner Chicago The American Educational Research Association's annual conference saw more than 15,700 attendees two...
...And once Prof...
...And then there was Session 31.078, for me personally (though this time I won't call it data), the highlight of two and a half days at the conference: "Tyranny of Neoliberalism on Education...
...For this I skipped "'Critical' Teacher Education With an Attitude," and boy was it worth it...
...Milton Friedman visited Chile, freedom steadily disappeared, but the free market thrived, and so on...
...I am also guilty of undercounting, as I was not able to attend all the sessions that, from their descriptions in the program, begged for public ridicule...
...I wasn't even able to drop by the presentation entitled "'Bitch Barbies Love Bully Boys': Transgressive Femininities and Gender Hierarchies in Schools" or the one devoted to "Masculine Generic Animals in a First-Grade Science Classroom...
...But this wasn't the best part: That came when discussant Kenneth J. Saltman of DePaul University played the postmodernist to Hill's Marxist...
...To which I thought: Fair enough, but first can we have an honest conversation about movies...
...There was the principal, Rita Tenorio of La Escuela Fratney in Milwaukee, who talked about "resisting" the federal No Child Left Behind Act—this at a panel on "the Tyranny of Standardization," where another presenter talked of the warm feelings he got that morning driving into Chicago as he passed a billboard asking President Bush how many Americans he had killed today...
...I've got 14 minutes to change the world," said the second speaker, Dave Hill, who seemed not much interested in education, and who presented not one iota of research, not even a movie clip...
...There was the researcher on a panel about homework, who said "our schools seem better suited to a totalitarian regime...
...Okay, maybe "subtlety" wasn't her strong suit...
...Granted, sitting in a hotel basement and telling a dozen tired-looking people what you learned by interviewing a handful of third graders about their self-esteem hardly seems like a solid foundation for a career in research...
...The data: This is what I perceived, felt even...
...This jargon of postmodernism and international relations was widely deployed to describe the ABCs of American education...
...Inspired by the experts around me, I conducted my own research project...
...Then he decentralized the public schools and refocused curricula on measurable results...
...It was about public schooling in Chile...
...Dixon was the student of session chair Mark B. Tappan of Colby College...
...Somehow Tappan seemed to have missed the import of both scenes: The audience's sympathies are intended to be with the victims...
...He then showed graphs correlating the levels of frustration expressed by lower-grade children with how they rank their own reading skills...
...The principal thought the blouse inappropriate and told her so, repeatedly, since Patricia continued to wear it to work...
...The author, Jill Andrea Pinkney Pastrana of the University of Wisconsin, said that after General Pinochet came to power through a military coup, he jailed dissidents and replaced university heads with army buddies...
...but she called the incident "tragic" and said the principal's reaction was certainly "grounded in racialized stereotypes" that unfortunately exercise "powerful domination and control" over the ethnic-gender discourse in teacher education...
...by David Skinner Chicago The American Educational Research Association's annual conference saw more than 15,700 attendees two weeks ago in Chicago...
...Then a woman identifying herself as a principal spoke up and said that, sometimes, you just "have to colonize yourself...
...Hill tried to make nice in his response, while Saltman stood behind him shaking his head No, no, no, like a petulant schoolchild, at everything the Marxist said...
...Which means I've committed significant selection bias in my own research...
...Today in the United States," she said, "we're putting the exact same reforms in place...
...One was from the 1999 movie Varsity Blues, in which a coldhearted coach, played by Jon Voight, tells one of his players to stop complaining about an injury...
...Tappan presented, it became clear where the young scholar had picked up his research know-how...
...In another, from the 1986 movie Stand by Me, a macho teenager played by Kiefer Sutherland picks on poor little River Phoenix...
...Saltman asked each presenter a single question, but then held forth at length on what a crazy thing it was to be a Marxist in this day and age, given Marxism's failure to take culture seriously, its self-conscious vanguardism, its history of misogyny, and a dozen other things (but not Marxism's culpability in the 20th-century's staggering ideological death toll...
...Fourteen minutes was not enough, so please "Google me," he said, under "Dave Hill, Marxist...
...The findings: Being a presenter at AERA correlated highly with negative feelings about President Bush and the American political system...
...These are the people whom Bill Bennett, as secretary of education, affectionately labeled The Blob—ed school professors, district officials, principals, teachers, teachers-in-training, graduate students, and education researchers...
...In the after-discussion, an instructor of teachers-in-training said that he agreed that one's authentic identity should not be snuffed out for the sake of appeasing an administrator...
...Researcher Terri L. Rodriguez of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, quoted a young Latina woman named Patricia as saying, "I always feel everybody else is blue-colored pencils," while she, Patricia, is "a red-colored pencil...
...After a couple of days, this masculine animal had already endured all the "science" he could stand...
...Todd Dixon, a seventh-grade teacher presenting "a sociocultural perspective on why boys quit reading" found that little boys "receive hegemonic messages...
...Hill's basic point: Class oppression is the granddaddy of all the other forms of oppression...
...Quaint little personal stories are offered in the same spirit as laboratory findings...
...The red-colored heart of Patricia's story was an incident involving her blouse, a "peasant top" that she sometimes wore while teaching...
...Furrowed brows all around...
...He quoted one of his soon-to-be-teachers saying, "I'm ghetto, so I have to be ghetto" in the classroom...
...This led to negative feelings on Patricia's part...
...For this I skipped Session 31.056: "'Critical' Teacher Education With an Attitude," and boy was it worth it...
...The first paper was called, enticingly, "Subtle Tortures of the Neolib-eral Age...
...Tappan closed by saying, "We have to have an honest conversation about male privilege...
...The highlight of the conference was "Tyranny of Neoliberalism on Education...
...Among the six kids he'd interviewed—that's right, six—those who found reading frustrating were likely to think poorly of their own reading skills...
...But here at AERA, data has been defined down...
...Consider the sixth presentation of the "Social Identity and Race as Context and Complexity for Teacher Education" session...
...But, he wondered, wasn't it sometimes the case that what a young teacher considered essential to his or her identity was not, well, appropriate for the classroom...
...Farnsworth said it was not her intention to assess blame, David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard...
...Of course, some sessions at AERA were quite serious...
...Tappan, to discuss "Media, Masculinity, and the 'Boy Crisis,'" showed a series of movie clips for the audience to see what terrible messages are out there about being young and male...
Vol. 12 • April 2007 • No. 31
