Talking points on Shor's, "Empowering Education."

"All forms of education are political because they can enable or inhibit the questioning habits of students, thus developing or disabling their critical relation to knowledge, schooling, and society." (12-13)

I agree with this sentiment.  I believe that many of our students' are silenced in our nation's schools.  To me, it is really a disservice to students to "inhibit [their] questioning habits." The well-known bumper sticker reads; "Question Authority", but as John Cougar Mellencamp sang; "I fight authority, authority always wins."  It seems to me that students do, indeed, learn pretty early on that you can't really fight authority.  Those who do, as Shor puts it, "drop out or withdraw into passivity or silence in the classroom.  Some become self-educated; some sabotage the curriculum by misbehaving." (14)  In turn, these students get seen as problems in the classroom.  They get blamed for not learning appropriately within the context of the way the educational system is set up.  These become the lost children in our classrooms.  Tragically, too often, we look at students who are not served by the education system as, to borrow a phrase from Johnathan Kozol, "Other People's Children."

"Moreover, testing policies are political choices, whether to use student-centered, multicultural, and portfolio assessments, or to use teacher-centered tests or standardized exams in which women and minorities have traditionally scored lower than men and whites." (15)

The policy of testing is obviously a very large issue in today's schools.  The subject of standardized testing dominates much of the discussion surrounding public education today.

The story that Dr. Stevos published on her blog about Hope High School is a good example of how the results of standardized tests don't necessarily reflect what kind of learning is taking place.  I was at many of the school board meetings where students, teachers, and parents made the convincing case that the system in place at Hope was working.  The school may not have been perfect, but one got the strong sense that there was a community there that had embraced the block scheduling and the way it effected the interactions between teachers and students.

However, this is a case where the goals and concerns of the members of the school community itself were ignored.  The tests said that the school was a failure, despite the fact that the members of the school community insisted that there was success happening.   So, the changes that seemed to be working were dropped, saving the city some money, and using test scores as a justification.  It is now likely that Hope High School, instead of continuing to grow on the successes that it had established, will continue to sink into a state of further despair.  Hope High School "fought authority, and authority won."

"Education is experienced by students as something done to them, not something they do." (20)

This quote nicely encapsulates the theme of the sense of disengagement that many students feel with the education system.  We need to find ways to engage students in education from an early age, and to keep them engaged throughout their school careers.  The motivation for learning should not be to get a high mark on a standardized test so your school won't be closed, but rather all children should be encouraged to become active, cognizant, citizens with the ability to learn, to question, and to think critically about issues that affect them.


Education is political.  Unfortunately, I feel that to a large extent, education in our country still works towards maintaining a power structure that is inequitable for many of our students.  Yes, many children come to school equipped to receive the knowledge that is given to them in our educational institutions.  Many of those students succeed academically to the extent that the system expects them to.  Afterall, we are all sitting in a college classroom, which to some degree means that we are academic success stories. 

Personally, I don't believe that any children are unreachable.  However, I believe that our educational system has yet to develop into one that works for all, or even a majority of, our country's students.  For us to have an education system that accomplished the task of being able to effectively serve everyone, I feel that there needs to be more of a universal acknowledgment that there are systems of inequity in place in our society.