Keith Christiansen's List: Educational Issues

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  “Education is the civil rights issue of this tim

• The passage of laws promoting high-stakes testing for students and the use of test scores to measure teacher quality have both limited the autonomy of teacher authority and devalued the possibility of critical teaching and visionary goals for student learning. Teachers are no longer asked to think critically and be creative in the classroom.
• Put bluntly, knowledge that can't be measured is viewed as irrelevant, and teachers who refuse to implement a standardized curriculum and evaluate young people through objective measures of assessments are judged as incompetent or disrespectful
• . Any educator who believes that students should learn more than how to obey the rules, take tests, learn a work skill or adopt without question the cruel and harsh market values that dominate society "will meet," as James Baldwin insists in his "Talk to Teachers," "the most fantastic, the most brutal and the most determined resistance."
• teachers are increasingly removed from dealing with children as part of a broader historical, social and cultural context.
• mposition of a stripped-down curriculum that actually disdains creative teacher work while relegating teachers to the status of clerks
• education should be viewed as a moral and political practice that always presupposes particular renditions of what constitutes legitimate knowledge, values, citizenship, modes of understanding and views of the future. In other words, teaching was always directive in its attempt to shape students as particular agents and offer them a particular understanding of the present and the future. And while schools have a long history of simply attempting to reproduce the ideological contours of the existing society, they are capable of much more, and therein lay their danger and possibilities.
• what must be embraced in this recognition of the importance of public schools teachers is that such an investment is an issue of politics, ethics and power, all of which must be viewed as part of a larger struggle to connect the crisis of schooling and teaching to the crisis of democracy itself.
• Teachers all over America now labor under the shadow of a number of anti-democratic tendencies extending from a ruthless market fundamentalism that mistakes students for products and learning to the practice of conformity and disciplinary mindlessness.
• it is not enough to teach students how to read the word and knowledge critically. They most also learn how to act on their beliefs, reflect on their role as engaged citizens and intervene in the world as part of the obligation of what it means to be a socially responsible agent.
• The reason why public education has become so dangerous is that it associates teaching and learning with civic values, civic courage and a respect for the common good - a position decidedly at odds with the unbridled individualism, privatized discourse, excessive competition, hyper militarized masculinity and corporate values that now drive educational policy and practice.
• I strongly believe that genuine, critical education cannot be confused with job training.
• Teachers represent a valued resource and are one of the few groups left that can educate students in ways that enable them to resist the collective insanity that now threatens this country. We need to take them seriously by giving them the dignity, labor conditions, salaries, freedom, time and support they deserve. This may be the most important challenge Americans face as we move into the 21st century.

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