The Global Intelligencer - Exploring individual, social and global transformation
Visit our user forums The Arts Science Technology Society Environment Business
Life & Health Fringe Editorial Subscribe to The Global Intelligencer Advertise with The Global Intelligencer Archives About The Global Intelligencer

Going Beyond "No Child Left Behind"

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was originally adopted in 1965, as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It was intended to provide resources to improve education in poor communities, to equalize educational opportunities and (significantly though less obviously) to provide more skilled workers to the labor market.

The law needed to be reauthorized by Congress every five years, and as this has taken place periodically, ESEA has been considerably amended, reflecting the changing political realities of the last forty years. In 2002, the Bush administration persuaded Congress to infuse ESEA with the draconian standards-and-testing agenda of “No Child Left Behind.”

Although it still promised to “close the gap” between the privileged and the impoverished (and hence won broad political support), NCLB represented a massive consolidation of federal control over the content and process of public education, as well as a powerful endorsement of conservative educational ideology.

By dictating that schools must demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” as measured solely by standardized test scores, NCLB effectively saddled the schools with a pedagogy of “transmission”--the authoritative transfer of approved knowledge. This standardization of teaching and learning leaves virtually no room for practices that progressive and holistic educators believe are vital to authentic learning, such as emergent or individualized curriculum, critical inquiry, artistic expression, or time to reflect and relax. Standardization chokes off creativity, imagination, exploration, and teachers’ professional as well as intuitive judgment. Educators become technicians administering one-size-fits-all classroom scripts. In response, many of our most idealistic teachers are leaving the public schools.

This year, ESEA/NCLB is due to be reauthorized again, and both supporters and opponents of the standardization agenda have mobilized to influence the nation’s lawmakers. The differences between them reflect radically different educational paradigms. On one side, political and corporate leaders, the media, major foundations, and most state education officials believe that schools need to “produce” workers who are prepared to compete in the global economy. They believe that there is a particular body of knowledge that all students need to learn, and that there is an orderly, even “scientific,” way to present this knowledge. They are concerned, to the point of obsession, with “accountability,” which is demonstrated through test scores.

Opponents of NCLB, on the other hand, believe that education for a democratic society must start with a basic respect for the diversity of young people’s learning styles, life goals, personalities, as well as family and community values; a democratic education must not aim to crank out any sort of standardized human being. In this view, NCLB is more accurately labeled “Childhood Left Behind,” because the natural ways in which young people experience the world and make sense of it—through free exploration, play, and self-motivated curiosity—are throttled by the consuming regimen of standardized curriculum and relentless testing.

The question is whether educational policy will continue to look backward to the assembly line model of the nineteenth century, or forward to the holistic, organic, personalized forms of social life that are evolving at this time. Sociologist William Spady, who has been involved in educational reform for decades, wrote a brilliant critique of NCLB in the widely-read publication Education Week ( Jan. 10, 2007 ). He pointed out that the dawning of the Information Age about 25 years ago challenged society to become “future-focused” or “stay the course and become obsolete.”

The business world, wrote Spady, has adapted new models, but schools fell into a “great regression” that “moved education policy and practice further and further away from the new research realities: what we know and continue to discover about learners, learning, brain development and functioning, human potential and motivation, our ever-changing world, and successful life performance.” Spady observed that educational pioneers such as John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and Rudolf Steiner developed models that are relevant to the new cultural era—but that their work is largely ignored in official policy.

Educators are beginning to speak out against the “great regression” of NCLB and to promote a more democratic, holistic vision of teaching and learning. One of their most ambitious efforts is the recent founding of t he Educator Roundtable. On their website, educatorroundtable.org, they propose “15 steps toward an alternate educational universe and a healthier society.” These include a call for a “national dialogue on the purposes and aims of public schools in a democratic republic” and a recognition that since “there is no single best approach that fits every learning context, encourage local choice in deciding curriculums and instructional strategies that are grounded in best practices as defined by teachers, researchers, and the professional associations that represent various disciplines.”

The Educator Roundtable has drafted a petition that states, in part, “We, the educators, parents, and concerned citizens whose names appear below, reject the misnamed No Child Left Behind Act and call for legislators to vote against its reauthorization. We do so not because we resist accountability, but because the law's simplistic approach to education reform wastes student potential, undermines public education, and threatens the future of our democracy.”

This is a significant and currently relevant issue that could seriously affect the shape of the emerging culture. Anyone concerned with promoting a more conscious lifestyle should understand the agenda of educational standardization and join with the educators who oppose it with a more holistic vision.

(This essay adapted from Spring, 2007 issue of Education Revolution. See edrev.org/aeromagazine.html)


Ron Miller, Ph.D. has been a leading activist and scholar in the emerging field of holistic education since 1988, when he founded the journal Holistic Education Review. He is on the faculty of GoddardCollege in Vermont. For more information see PathsOfLearning.net and edrev.org Alternative Education Resource Organization, learningalternatives.net International Association for Learning Alternatives, and great-ideas.org Holistic Education Press.

 

  

Discovery of self – inner city kids reframe their identity

by Cathy Ellis

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Life changed for 12 year-old Careino Gurley the day Jane Barrash, now director of The Continuum Center, walked into his classroom in 1991. Placed in Harrison Secondary in north Minneapolis, a school for seriously emotionally and behaviorally disordered kids at the bottom 3% of state scholastic performance, Gurley, like every other kid in the room, had slid down the academic rungs to the last place the system would manage him.

Primarily kids of color, all the students at Harrison had been kicked out of treatment centers, other schools or hospitals. They represented the full range of problems coming from the inner city: poverty, domestic dysfunction, illiteracy, drug addiction, alcoholism and crime.

To say Barrash was met with disbelief when she started talking about how science shows humans are connected at the subatomic levels, and how thoughts and emotions and attitudes are connected to results in life, is an understatement. “They called me ‘Crazy Lady’ at first,” says Barrash. “But after about three weeks they were intrigued.”

Following the curriculum, a sophisticated but widely accessible synthesis of leading-edge science and time-honored cultural teachings, the children learned about matter as energy, the quantum leap, synchronicity, metaphor, and paradox. Pulling in West African, East Indian, Asian and Native American cultural perspectives and inner disciplines, blended with Western scientifically based self-regulation and imagery techniques, the children also learned diaphragmatic breathing and focusing strategies over the nine month course.

“We go through the concepts in the workbook with baby steps to make the material easier to digest,” says Barrash. “But at the end of it, they really understand that there is a different set of operating assumptions at play in the universe, and it's not about manipulating all the external variables - but more about developing what you've got on the inside.”

Much more than learning “positive thinking” the kids involved in Discovery of Self programs have to stretch their understanding of how and why things happen, and dig deep to understand the different levels from which they create/manifest/attract all aspects of their lives.

At the end of the course, one young girl, Jazmine wrote, “This class has changed my life completely for the better…I’ve learned that the only person in my life I can change is Jazmine…I am convinced the only thing holding me back is me.” For Careino Gurley, everything changed.

“I was kind of a pessimist, and I think that comes just from being in the environments that I was born and raised in and not having the advantages that some other places offer,” says Gurley, now 29. “I would say that I thought pessimistically about some things, especially in regards to that school. And she gave me some hope and drew on some of my strengths and let me know that I control basically how I feel about a situation. And I learned to remain in control about how I feel about a situation.”

Soon after the Discovery of Self course, Gurley was moved out of Harrison and placed in a mainstream school. The first member of his family to go to college, he graduated and now is back in north Minneapolis as a mental health worker teaching life skills to kids that have been diagnosed with ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder, as well as children on probation. He also serves as a football coach with Minneapolis Parks and Recreation, and works with Barrash as an associate teacher with the Discovery of Self program.

“I use the things that Jane discusses in her curriculum, and I use them a lot in preparing kids for football games, and helping them prepare for job interviews,” says Gurley. “I tell people to imagine on a daily basis things going good. I tell ‘em, ‘Let's not focus and give the energy to what can happen negatively, but give the energy to what can happen positively; what good can happen.’”

Discovery of Self

Now taught in a variety of formats and curriculum lengths, Discovery of Self programs have been found to be equally effective for people in minimum and maximum security prisons, homeless shelters, regular schools and in corporate and medical settings.

Since 1995 the training program has been taken into businesses, shelters, medical centers and treatment programs, with great success and only minor curriculum changes necessary to match each audience. Even those familiar with many of the topics find it effective.

“This material is so fresh and new that everybody is a kid,” says Barrash. “The workbook was written for students operating at the level of a 12 year-old. But even to a corporate executive much of this is new information, so they are listening with the same kind of beginner's mind.”

And proof that it only takes a small seed to grow into something remarkable, the latest evolution of the Discovery of Self program is a Minnesota charter public school. In October 2006, Continuum Academy was one of only four charter public schools to receive approval by the Minnesota State Department of Education. Sponsored by the Audubon Center of the North Woods, Continuum Academy will open in the fall of 2008 as a middle school, expanding to include high school and eventually opening schools around the country.

The school will integrate consciousness research and traditional cultural teachings into coursework that covers all required subject matter. Conventional subjects will be approached in an interdisciplinary and holistic manner, incorporate project-based learning, service learning and include study of the world within.

In addition to plans for its own new school, Continuum Center has been invited to expand its role in north Minneapolis . In the midst of the achievement gap in that district,

Continuum has been asked by a Minneapolis Public Schools initiative to provide its Discovery of Self training to the teaching staff and the students of a new satellite site.

This new site is designed to expose children to a hybrid academic model and to a new paradigm casting them as pools of talent waiting to be tapped, challenged and motivated, rather than “high risk.” The current plan is for Continuum to provide teacher training and direct delivery to students of the Discovery of Self curriculum three days a week. The proposed second phase is that Discovery of Self would be provided to all ten schools in this north side initiative.

Careino Gurley is one of four facilitators in training to teach Discovery of Self, and as a former “high risk” student of the program more than 15 years ago, his participation at this level is a wonderful demonstration of perseverance paying off, and that what goes around, comes around. “I think the medicine of the 21st century is inspiration, and there isn't a lot out there right now,” says Barrash. “But I think inspiration can, with some tools and proper orientation, be something that really can be used as a walking stick to move us all forward.”

For more information about the ContinuumCenter: www.continuumcenter.net

 

printer friendly version

  








   
 
 
Annah Darrah reviews Mimzy PLUS book reviews of The Science of Oneness and The Money Game
 
 
Can things get better? by Fred Alan Wolf PLUS Lynne McTaggart talks about how future choices might affect the present.
 
 
Some very EV ideas from a member of the Electric Auto Association PLUS Driving students toward science.
 
 
The Oneness Movement is making an impact around the world PLUS Inner city kids learn how to reframe their identities.
 
 
Waves: the next clean, green power "Power buoys" make waves in Oregon studies PLUS reducing your carbon footprint at home.
 
 
Reinventing the wheel Tesla Motors’ electric Roadster puts Detroit to shame PLUS GreenFinds finds MTV showing some green.
 
 
The art of accomplishment The six principles of success PLUS the convergence of science, spirituality and peace.
 
 
Quantum elements of an old mystical tradition Tarot cards may be more “scientific” than we think PLUS The history of Tarot.
 
 
Editor Cate Montana talks about a love of automobiles, and some automobiles to love – past and present.


Forums | The Arts | Living | Education | Science & Technology | Society & Health
Business | Environment | Fringe | Editorial | Subscribe | Advertise | Archives | About TGI

All content on this website, and the websites of our affiliate publications, is copyrighted and may not be used or duplicated in any fashion without express written and contractual consent of Global Intelligence Press. © 2006 Global Intelligence Press

Website design by MetaDesign and Shelly Lucus. Code by newdaydesign.com