If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them – Naomi Klein (2005).

The at-risk “local population,” I’m most familiar with would be teachers, school administrators, and school board members who believe that the school reform movement is aimed at improving education. It isn’t. It’s about dismantling government and creating a more favorable business climate.

Paul Rosenberg makes the connection between disaster capitalism and current education policy, pointing out that cash-strapped state and local governments are willing to jump through reform hoops, such as lifting restrictions on charter schools and pegging teacher evaluations to student test scores to qualify for federal money. This, despite a glaring lack of evidence that proposed policy changes will actually do any good.

The more I see and hear of it, the less it sounds like good is what the reformers have in mind. Take Arne Duncan, for example. Our Secretary of Ed is regularly critical of some aspect of the education system. Last week, it was teacher preparation programs in schools of education. I’m not going to defend them, since my undergrad training program was pathetic. But Jim Horn is right; when Duncan attacks teacher training programs, and in the next breath praises simple certification mills that churn out Teach For America temps on 2-year urban adventures, what should we conclude about his commitment to quality? Horn suggests that, instead, Duncan should be going after business schools for the chaos they’ve visited on our economy. Indeed.

Duncan:

I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, about promoting civic knowledge and participation, the classroom is the place to start. Children today in our neediest schools are more likely to have the least qualified teachers. And that is why great teaching is about more than education—it is a daily fight for social justice.

I don’t get it; this seems altogether backward. I say, “Education is about more than great teaching.” It’s also about informed policy implementation, professional development (which was his original point), and an economic climate favorable to families and child welfare. The opportunity, inequality, and civic knowledge he is so concerned about is mere rhetoric, coming from him, and it’s being dished out in a decidedly undemocratic manner. If he or any in the reformistocracy had a sincere interest in civil rights they’d be fighting to right a host of social wrongs on multiple fronts rather than leaning exclusively on teachers. The business class, though, is in its ascendancy, and it’s looking for new colonial conquests.

This realization was brought home for me the other day when I ran across a couple of essays by the agrarian writer, Wendell Berry. Berry has been writing for at least the last few decades about agricultural policy and the tension between agrarianism and industrialism. The news is not good. According to Berry, we had less than half the number of farmers in the United States in 2002, than we had in 1977. Realizing that the neoliberal reforms we see being promoted in education are already well-established in the food production network is not comforting, but it does bring the issues into sharper focus.

In The Idea of a Local Economy, Berry points out that, as concern for environmental degradation has been established as a policy issue, it has done so at the cost of being oversimplified. Much the same could be said about education:

We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of “raw materials,” and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more technologically powerful and more brutal.

And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as “environmental” problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them. This oversimplification is now either a matter of corporate behavior or of behavior under the influence of corporate behavior. This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations.

Berry offers a critique of “free market” capitalism and points out, among other things, that:

The “law of competition” does not imply that many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the “free market” will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.

As an alternative, Berry proposes that we develop the idea of local economies based on two principles, neighborhood and subsistence. This seems like as reasonable a proposal for school policy as it does for agriculture. Meet local demands with local solutions. Local capacity to solve problems must be conserved, and not delegated to distant others.

While I was out in the woods working, I was thinking about this video that John Connell posted in which the narrator and chief engineer of a monumental stone-moving project, Wally Wallington, declared, “I try to do this without any mechanical machinery at all. I use mostly sticks and stones for my equipment; no pulleys, no hoists, no metal levers – just try to use gravity, too – I believe it’s my favorite tool.”

Building Stonehenge – This Man can Move Anything

Wallington is a retired carpenter. And now, thanks to the internet, he’s a physics teacher. He has his own website, The Forgotten Technology, where he shares some of the theory behind his project idea. He claims to have moved a 30′ X 40′ barn 200 feet, by hand.

Watching him lift and move those heavy concrete blocks made my woodpile seem small, even though my sore back and tired legs tell me otherwise.

[T]he Commission concludes that reform in mathematics and science will be possible only if we “do school differently” in ways that emphasize the centrality of math and science to educational improvement and innovation…. As a society, we must commit ourselves to the proposition that all students can achieve at high levels in math and science, that we need them to do so for their own futures and for the future of our country, and that we owe it to them to structure and staff our educational system accordingly.

Gerald Bracey urges us to think critically when we use international comparisons to guide education policy:

Principle 23 of the “principles of data interpretation [pdf]” that organize “Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered,” reads “If the situation really is as alleged ask, ‘So what?’” The question does not call for some smart-ass response, it calls for an evaluation of the consequences of the situation. So the U. S. is not #1 in mathematics or science testing. So what? So, very little.

First, comparing nations on average scores is a pretty silly idea. It’s like ranking runners based on average shoe size or evaluating the high school football team on the basis of how fast the average senior can run the 40-yard dash. Not much link to reality. What is likely much more important is how many high performers you have.

Bracey brought this report from the OECD to the attention of the EDDRA list, Top of the Class: High Performers in Science in PISA 2006

Figure 1.2 depicts the number of 15-year-old students proficient at Levels 5 and 6 on the PISA science scale by country. Both the proportion of top performers within a country and the size of countries matter when establishing the contribution of countries to the global talent pool: even though the proportion of top performers in science is comparatively low in the United States, the United States takes up a quarter of the pie shown in Figure 1.2, simply because of the size of the country. In contrast Finland, that educates the highest share of 15-year-olds to Levels 5 and 6 in the PISA science scale, only contributes 1% to the OECD pool of top-performing 15-year-old students, because of its small size.

The US seems to be putting up a fair number of high performers, comparatively.

I am 100% in favor of quality math and science education. And since the Cargegie Commission understands that “America’s young people care deeply about problems such as global warming, world hunger, and poor health and want to be involved in solving them,” I hope they don’t forget to mention this to the corporate interests that are causing all these problems. We’ll want their cooperation when we get around to buiding our “sustainable future.”

The staff went into high gear. We became a science-focused magnet school. There were science specialists and guest speakers. We had intensive professional development, invention conventions, star-gazing nights, family science festivals, and a special Discovery Room with shelves full of kits and equipment for science activities that became a resource for the rest of the community.

By the time I joined the staff in 1997, the grant money was spent and the project was no longer being materially supported. We had a new principal, some teacher turnover, no more science specialist in the Discovery Room, no science curriculum development, and the school had moved on, adopting a literacy focus.

In 2004, we moved into a fantastic new state of the art building, built to replace the aging original structure. We now have wireless internet, tight windows, a special wing for Music classes, and small-group instructional spaces for special programs so they don’t have to meet in the hall. It works well, and I am very glad to be there.

This year we became a 21st Century Community Learning Center with a grant-funded after school program for academically at risk and low income students.

We will not have a school science fair this year, though, because the after school program consumes so much staff time and energy.

We expected the New Century would be all about innovation and discovery, but it’s been downgraded to basic skills. And Lou Gerstner is still out there trying to reform us. Now he asks “…why we are at this point — why after millions of pages, in thousands of reports, from hundreds of commissions and task forces, financed by billions of dollars, have we failed to achieve any significant progress?”

He thinks we need national standards. I think we are very tired of these people tinkering at the margins and telling us what to do.

Maybe this is normal. This is the age of multi-tasking, after all. But is multi-tasking the best way to get things done? The answer may come from brain research, rather than behavior management. Rather than going on an information diet or simply trying to do more things, more efficiently, Torkel Klingberg, author of The Overflowing Brain, named the Most Important Book of 2008 by SharpBrains, suggests that we learn to exercise our memory. The problem as he sees it is that many of us suffer from an attention deficit trait due to the normal limits of working memory, which brain science now tells us can be enhanced through training exercises.

Klingberg says:

The information age has provided us with high technology which fills our days with an ever increasing amount of information and distraction. We are constantly flooded with on-the-go emails, phone calls, advertisements and text-messages and we try to cope with the increasing pace by multi tasking. A survey of workplaces in the United States found that the personnel were interrupted and distracted roughly every three minutes and that people working on a computer had on average eight windows open at the same time. There is no tendency for this to slow down; the amount and complexity of information continually increases.

He attributes frequent distractions and the need to multi-task as the two major contributors to information overload. And he doesn’t even mention teaching elementary school. If he did, I’m sure he’d have added classroom management to his list.

Working memory, he explains, is a scarce resource. His research shows that working memory can be improved through training exercises, and that the improvement generalizes to enhance our ability to focus on everyday tasks beyond those used in the training environment. He also says that fluid intelligence, related to working memory, can also be increased.

This is hugely interesting, since one of the major problems in teaching is the difficulty so many students have remembering what teachers feel they should know after going over and over the same material. “Training our brains might thus be a way to keep up with the increasing demands of the information age,” Klingberg writes.

It might also be a way to get through the semester.

Other links for this topic:

Attention Must Be Paid – a review of Klingberg’s book at Inside Higher Ed.

Try Thinking and Learning Without Working Memory – general background information on working memory.

Articles by Klingberg – especially noted: “Training of Working Memory in Children with ADHD,” (2002) for the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, which has good background info on ADHD.

More about Promising Cognitive Training Studies for ADHD.