Reforming Schools: Working within a Progressive Tradition during Conservative Times

FOREWORD

The beginning of the twenty-first century is not an encouraging time to be a progressive educator. The conservative restoration (Apple, 2001) with its emphasis on testing, accountability, and nationally directed standards is picking up speed. Teachers, as a consequence, are being deskilled (Apple, 1986; Gitlin, 1983). The problematic relation between culture, curriculum, and schooling is also strengthened as pedagogical relationships between students and teachers are becoming more strained and alienated (Weis and Fine, 1993). And so the query before many of us who take a progressive bent is: What can be done? Academics, of many stripes, have leaped into the fray to address this query. For some, conservatives, the answer lies in strengthening the conservative restoration by increasing standards, dictating curriculum, and coming down hard on students that don’t abide with school norms and dominant forms of socialization (Hirsch, 1988; Ravitch and Finn, 1989). For others, the radical left, the answer lies in taking a macro view of schooling, where schools are placed within a social context such that a good deal of attention is focused on the types of ideological and structural changes that need to occur if education is to become a force in the emancipation or transformation of cultural relations. For those trying to strengthen the conservative restoration it is hard to see how their proposals do more than make an already unequal playing field tilt toward those having the advantages of the “center” (i.e., the symbolic place where communities and cultures gain legitimacy and advantage by helping to form and then embody the types of cultural codes and mores associated with a particular view of expertise, status, value, and success). While this romantic vision of a society lost has some appeal to those cultural groups trying to maintain and increase the snug fit between schooling and dominant culture, a broader view of the issue, especially when looked at from the point of view of cultural groups typically disenfranchised by schooling, indicates that the reinforcement of the conservative restoration will, at best, legitimate Seymour Sarason’s refrain (1971) that the more things change the more they stay the same. Conversely, the problem for the radical left is not about the lack of change proposed or even its potential to alter the nature of schooling and its relation to culture but rather how to implement the broadly conceptualized recommendations within the limitations and constraints currently embodied within schooling. It is one thing to propose a critical pedagogy or critical literacy (Freire, 1993), and ix F O R E W O R D another to figure out how to utilize such an approach with an alienated teaching faculty who already feel overwhelmed by the increasing demands of testing and standardization. Understanding how the dominant images of society are reproduced within a schooling context, how the curriculum reflects an Anglo bias is different from considering how to put into place reforms or even transformations that take these understandings and place them within a context where teachers often have little autonomy in terms of the curriculum and content they teach. Where my bias is clearly on the side of those trying to create a more level playing field that significantly transforms the relation between schooling and culture, only producing more of the same types of texts, what might be called terrain adjusters (i.e., they adjust our understanding of the terrain known as schooling), may be limited in moving us in a direction that could broadly be termed progressive. And thus the rub is that not only are there limited options, but more importantly a third alternative is surely a “risky business.” Why, you ask? It is risky because as soon as one moves toward the practical, toward a contextual notion of reform, toward working within the boundaries of the established limits of schooling, one is leaving the community codes of the radical left and inching toward a community that the left despises almost as much as the conservatives—the liberal community with its focus on individualism and working within established institutional structures. It takes great courage, therefore, and a lack of care for one’s standing within the established leftist community, to move beyond the boundaries of this progressive group of scholars. This is not to suggest that doing so will necessarily produce something of added value. And it is not to suggest that the left itself is flawed. Rather, I want to suggest, that we shouldn’t be surprised that, as is true of most communities...