Curriculum Studies in the United States: Present Circumstances, Intellectual Histories

Present Circumstances, Intellectual Histories

W. Pinar

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137303424
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Pinar documents that the field of curriculum studies in the United States is in the early stages of a second paradigm shift, this time stimulated by present political circumstances. He explains why their acceptance in contemporary scholarship signals their conceptual exhaustion and how recent work in the field begins to surpass them.

1

Present Circumstances

Abstract: I start this chapter with acknowledgment that economists have replaced educationists as the key players in contemporary educational research, citing the research of Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard University and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia University. Focusing on the flaws of the research, I accent its political complicity with the privatization of public education, in which “brick-and-mortar” schools are dismissed as antiquated “twentieth-century” institutions unable to cope with twenty-first century’s realities. When curriculum is moved online, students can remain at home, and teachers, with whom students may have no direct contact, act as auditors, with commensurately reduced wages and intellectual influence. I focus on K12 Inc., a publicly traded company that manages several such “schools,” as well as Apple Computers’ presence in one North Carolina “model school.” I conclude with commentary on the state-wide protests of teachers in Idaho against the forced incursion of technology into their classrooms.

Pinar, F. William. Curriculum Studies in the United States: Present Circumstances, Intellectual Histories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137303424.

[D]isciplines are political structures that mediate crucially between the political economy and the production of knowledge.

Timothy Lenoir (1993, 72)

In early 2012, economists¹ Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard University and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia University reported the results of research in which they tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years. In their findings, Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff ascribed astonishing power to elementary- and middle-school teachers whose students’ standardized test scores had increased. Those teachers, the economists concluded (in the reporter’s words), “had wide-ranging, lasting positive effects on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings” (Lowrey 2011, January 6, A1). All else being equal, the economists explained, students with one “excellent” teacher (defined as a teacher whose students’ standardized test scores rose) for one year between fourth and eight grades would gain $4,600 in lifetime income, compared to students with similar demographics whose scores did not increase (presumably because their teacher was “average”). Students enjoying an “excellent” teacher would also be 0.5 percent more likely to attend a university (Lowrey 2011, January 6, A14).

Nothing misleads like statistics² (and those who cite them), so more surprising than these economists’ fantastical “findings” were the straight faces with which they were reported. How could anyone possibly know it had been teachers who were responsible for the increased test scores? How did they know it had not been the parents? How about the live-in grandmother who helped with homework? (Never mind that the very concept of “influence” is too subtle and temporally complex to be quantified.) How did the economists know that those test scores did not rise due to vitamins or daily exercise or the well-lighted desk where the student was able to study without interruption? And surely the devout will want some credit kept for God. What about “effort” on the student’s part? Is there no credit to be accorded to the kid who took the test? How does the apparently increasing incidence of cheating on these tests figure in?³

Economics is specifically unsuited to the study of education. For starters, its conception of the human subject—as a self-interested rational individual (see Coyle 2007, 5, 124, 144)—is simplistic. “For if economics accepted without question the psychic diversity of motivation,” Steve Fuller (1993, 142) points out, “then the quantitative basis of the discipline would be undermined, given that values cannot be calculated unless they are reducible to a common currency of utilities.” Reductionism is not the only problem for the field of economics; so is its tendency to substitute correlation for causality. In historical studies, Diane Coyle admits, no reciprocal relation between education and economic growth has ever been found: “Yet education cannot have been decisive during the Industrial Revolution, when literacy levels were low, and many innovators hadn’t been to school at all” (Coyle 2007, 51). Perhaps today, with education reduced to job preparation, a closer correlation is conceivable (see Coyle 2007, 50), but confusing correlation with causation, as Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff have done, cannot advance that cause, however misguided a cause reducing education to job preparation is.

The Chetty, Friedman, Rockoff research is also contradicted by the research of other economists who have shown that income, more than race or any other factor, is correlated with achievement quantified as test scores. The correlation between economic advantage and student performance has been documented for decades, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. Recent research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University examined the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families during the past 50 years. Reardon found that the difference in achievement between white and black students has “narrowed significantly” (Tavernise 2012, February 10, A1) over the past few decades, while the difference between rich and poor students has “grown substantially” during the same period (Tavernise 2012, February 10, A3). “We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” concludes Reardon (quoted in Tavernise 2012, February 10, A3). Reardon has found that the difference in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students has increased by approximately 40 percent since the 1960s. It is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites. The correlation of income inequality⁴ with educational accomplishment was underscored in another study, this one conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan. They found that the difference between rich and poor children in college completion—statistically the single most important predictor of success in the work force—had increased by about 50 percent since the late 1980s (Tavernise 2012, February 10, A3).⁵

As have teachers for a century, Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske (2011, December 12, A21) asked: “Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty?” While poverty is not to be recommended, recall that this data is correlational. Besides poverty, cultural and familial as well as individual and psychological characteristics are no doubt determinative. Poverty is to be opposed because it is immoral, not only because those children who suffer it will score lower on standardized tests. On that point Ladd and Fiske concur.

Not since President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on Poverty has the elimination of poverty in the United States been a viable political issue. Since school reformers decline to tackle poverty, they provide forms of social support and experiences that middle-class students evidently enjoy as a matter of course. Ladd and Fiske (2011, December 12, A21) cite the Harlem Children’s Zone (there are problems there: see Pinar 2012, 28, 203), the East Durham, North Carolina Children’s Initiative, and Say Yes to Education in Syracuse, N.Y. I would add a 1980s example—LSYOU at Louisiana State University—where underachieving, poor, mostly black kids were housed on the LSU campus during the summer and provided intensive academic tutoring and social counseling. These programs are important as moral efforts at reparation, not as exemplars of social engineering.

The average SAT score of students from families earning more than $100,000 per year is more than 100 points higher than for students in the income rage of $50,000 to $60,000. Given these figures it is inevitable that only 3 percent of students in the most highly ranked 150 colleges and universities in the US come from families in the bottom income quartile of American society. As Andrew Delbanco (2012, March 9, A21) point outs, “students from affluent families have many advantages—test-prep tutors, high schools with good college counseling, parents with college savvy and so on.” Rather than measuring aptitude for academic success, college-entrance examinations are retrospective reflections of family income, enabling the monied to leverage economic into academic advantage.

The culture of competition—not of contemplation—intensifies, reaching back from secondary school into early- and middle-childhood education. In New York City, for instance, competition for admission to academically respected middle schools has become acute. Students’ scores on fourth- and fifth-grade standardized tests is one prerequisite to admission. Many parents—some wealthy, some not—are now spending hundreds and thousands of dollars for tutors and for courses. Never mind that almost all elementary schools now provide their own test preparation anyway (Phillips 2012, April 16, A14).

The Education Department has not discouraged private tutoring, nor would officials even comment when asked if they are concerned that private tutoring afforded wealthier students an unfair advantage in middle-school admissions. Evidently tutoring does provide such as advantage, as the Department has already noted an unusual rise in high scores on its tests for gifted programs, administered to 4- and 5-year-olds. High scores on these exams do not guarantee admission, however. They simply qualify the student to take yet another test, this one administered by the school itself (Phillips 2012, April 16, A14–A15). Constant testing replaces academic study, installing ignorance not erudition as outcomes.

A researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, Sabino Kornrich, and a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Frank F. Furstenberg, found that in 1972 affluent Americans were spending five times as much per child on education as low-income families. But by 2007 that difference in expenditure had increased to nine to one, as spending by upper-income families has more than doubled, while spending by low-income families increased by only 20 percent. “The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” observed Furstenberg (quoted in Tavernise 2012, February 10, A3).

In addition to tutors and test prep, what does affluence buy? It appears “time” and “experiences” are also among what can be purchased. An economist at the University of Chicago, James J. Heckman, argues that parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s cognitive ability and personality during the pre-school years. An associate professor of public policy and sociology at the UCLA, Meredith Phillips, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, e.g. their day care centers, or schools, from museums to shopping malls. By the time high-income children start school, they have enjoyed approximately 400 hours more than poor children in literary activities, Phillips found (Tavernise 2012, February 10, A3).

Like the conclusions of the survey research Meredith Phillips reported, geophysicist David Deming underscores the educational experience children enjoy at home as crucial to their later learning. He cites “reading” as primary, but he also worries about what “teachers can do with children who have not been challenged at home but instead have been indulged and entertained with an array of electronic devices” (Deming 2012, February 1, A15). Deming (2012, February 1, A15) is emphatic on this point: “Video-games have no educational value whatsoever. They are degrading, addictive, and stultifying.” He recommends books; they are “infinitely more beneficial” than “any type of electronic device.” Given the deluge of endorsements⁶ of “gaming” as supportive of cognitive development, that is brave advice.

Questions of the quality of childhood and the effects of economic inequality disappear in the contemporary obsession with test scores. It is unsurprising that curriculum studies in the United States is contracting in an era dominated by numbers. Those most qualified to understand what is at stake in educating the public for democracy—curriculum studies specialists—are being replaced with economists who correlate data but who are not trained (evidently) to distinguish between correlation and causality, let alone to ask the crucial curriculum question: what knowledge is of most worth? In this economistic era—in which the state of the economy, not the state of society or spirituality or sustainability, is the main thing—it is to be expected that economists enjoy an inflated influence. But even some economists have become alarmed at the moral corruption such power tempts.

At their January 2012 national meeting, US economists adopted new rules requiring them to disclose their financial ties to companies and to other groups that consult them. Critics both inside and outside the profession have alleged that those relationships—often lucrative and undisclosed—have influenced economists’ work negatively, so that, for instance, most economists missed the signs of the impending financial disaster of 2008. (So much for evidence-based research!⁷) More specifically, it is clear that many economists make policy recommendations that are in their clients’ interests, not in the interests of the economy overall (Casselman 2012, January 9, A2). (There was not one reference in the report to the public interest.) The new rules of professional conduct that US economists adopted will make more transparent their role in policy-making, presumably reducing the incidence of moral corruption. Do the economists referenced earlier—Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff—have financial investments in the test-making industry? If so, these will now be disclosed, presumably. How one wishes the moral corruption decoyed by the concept “school reform”—with its scapegoating of teachers and exploitation of children by computer companies⁸—would be become transparent to the American public.

Race to the top

Although the Obama administration still promotes its Race to the Top initiative, it disavows its programmatic progenitor: George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Congress in 2011 that NCLB would result in condemning 82 percent of all the nation’s public schools as failing. Skeptics questioned that projection, but Duncan insisted on its accuracy; President Obama repeated it in a speech three days later (Dillon 2011, December 15, A28). After having adopted the worst features of No Child Left Behind with its school-as-a-business model, by 2012 the Obama administration was dissociating itself from the political embarrassment created by failing to meet those “profit projections” (e.g. standardized test score results) it had adopted from NCLB.

In late 2011, a new study made clear that the administration’s statistics—that under NCLB criteria 82 percent of all US schools were failing—were mistaken. Th...