Berkeley Review of Education Fall/Winter 2017

BERKELEY REVIEW OF EDUCATION Volume 7 | Number 1 | Fall/Winter 2017

ISSN: 1947-5578

The Berkeley Review of Education (BRE) is published twice a year by students from the Graduate School of Education at the University of California Berkeley. BRE is an open access journal hosted by the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library and is also published in limited issue prints. The views expressed in the journal are not necessarily those of the Editors, the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education, the California Digital Library, or the Regents of the University of California.

Partial funding for BRE is provided by the Graduate School of Education and the Graduate Assembly of the University of California Berkeley.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF EDUCATION Volume 7 | Number 1 | Fall/Winter 2017 Editorial Board Corrine Aramburo Gema Cardona Rachel Chen Allison Firestone Cristobal Madero James Mason Frances Free Ramos Alyse Schneider Laura Tobben

Bryce Becker Elise Castillo Leah Faw Robin Irey Sarah Manchanda Allegra Midgette Dinorah Sanchez Loza Zuhra Teja Elizabeth Zumpe

BERKELEY REVIEW of EDUCATION Volume 7 | Number 1 | Fall/Winter 2017

ISSN: 1947-5578

CONTENTS

Editors’ Introduction

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Minority Serving Institutions: A Data-Driven Student Landscape in the Outcomes-Based Funding Universe

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Marybeth Gasman, Thai-Huy Nguyen, Andrés Castro Samayoa, and Daniel Corral

Righting Technologies: How Large-Scale Assessment Can Foster a More Equitable Education System

25

Nadia Behizadeh and Tom Liam Lynch

Homophobic Expression in K–12 Public Schools: Legal and Policy Considerations Involving Speech that Denigrates Others

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Suzanne E. Eckes

Special Features

Call for Conversations: Education in the Era of Trump

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Erin Dyke, Sarah Gordon, and Jennifer Job Adam Freas and Jesus Limon-Guzman Cheryl Burleigh Adam Rosenzweig Leela Velautham Eleni Eftychiou Curry Malott Michael Thier

Reimagining Educational Research: A Conversation Prudence L. Carter and Na’ilah Suad Nasir

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Cover design by José Ramón Lizárraga Layout by Leah Faw

Available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre

Editors’ Introduction Americans have long maintained faith in public education to facilitate social mobility and the American dream (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003). However, public schools have never been fully inclusive or equitable, despite numerous policies aimed at expanding educational opportunity and access. Furthermore, despite “reforming again, again, and again” (Cuban, 1990, p. 3), the basic institutional patterns, or “grammar” (Tyack & Tobin, 1994, p. 453), of public schooling, remain virtually the same, with little more than cosmetic changes that fail to meaningfully dismantle persistent inequities. To quote from the title of David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s 1995 book, school improvement has always been a slow, often disorderly, process of “tinkering toward utopia,” often because we neglect to learn from the history of American education reforms. These scholars reject quick solutions that can be easily implemented and call instead for fresh, carefully considered reform ideas informed by history that challenge dominant theories of how to improve schools and broaden educational opportunity.

The articles featured in Volume 7, Number 1, of the Berkeley Review of Education offer new perspectives on how schools can be more equitable and inclusive, shedding light on many unacknowledged factors that contribute to persistent inequities. Employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, the authors address how the political, social, economic, and cultural issues of the 21st century pose unique challenges to reversing inequitable conditions. For instance, one article calls attention to an institutional model within higher education that has effectively broadened opportunities for historically underserved populations, yet remains largely overlooked in policy discussions and funding decisions. Another article explores technologies that enable more complex and democratic assessments, but are underutilized due to dominant theories about teaching and learning. In a third article, the author describes how laws that are meant to protect free speech have not been accompanied by regulations that protect students from homophobic expression. A collection of short essays focuses on how the 2016 presidential election has created new issues and uncertainties regarding educational equity, inclusion, justice, and activism. Finally, two experienced education faculty researchers discuss the future of scholarly research and the potential for research to inform equity-oriented policies at a time when many Americans are questioning the legitimacy of scholarly expertise.

In our first article, Minority Serving Institutions: A Data-Driven Student Landscape in the Outcomes-Based Funding Universe, Marybeth Gasman and colleagues examine the unique contributions of Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) in educating low-income students of color in a resource-constrained environment that privileges outcomes typically associated with elite Predominantly White Institutions. The authors use descriptive statistics from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and National Science Foundation to illustrate the relationship between MSIs and outcomes for men of color, their role in growing the teacher pipeline, and their significant presence within the community college sector. The authors argue that MSIs deserve a more prominent position in national conversations if policymakers truly want to engender systemic change.

Berkeley Review of Education

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Editors’ Introduction

In our second article, Righting Technologies: How Large-Scale Assessment Can Foster a More Equitable Education System, Nadia Behizadeh and Tom Lynch examine the history of large-scale assessment in the United States. They argue that large-scale assessment has been standardized and predetermined, following the philosophies of Thorndike, rather than student-centered and negotiated, following the theories of Dewey, largely due to a confluence of technological capabilities and political factors of the time.

To counter this, the authors offer a framework for “negotiated control” and, using the assessment of writing as an example, propose ways in which modern technologies can support more negotiated and student-centered forms of large-scale assessment.

In our third article, Homophobic Expression in K–12 Public Schools: Legal and Policy Considerations Involving Speech that Denigrates Others, Suzanne Eckes reviews Supreme Court and lower court decisions that address the complicated balance of permitting free expression while curtailing hateful speech in public schools. She employs legal research methods to examine how these cases have shaped the current legal environment surrounding homophobic speech in K–12 public schools. The issue of homophobic speech is complex: On one hand, public schools are spaces where students learn to express their opinions freely, but on the other, homophobic speech undermines the goal of promoting inclusivity, tolerance, and safety. To illustrate this complexity, Eckes focuses her analysis on two federal circuit court cases with conflicting rulings on how schools should handle anti-LGBTQ speech. Eckes argues that, given legal precedents, school districts should set policies that simultaneously allow students to freely discuss their viewpoints on sexual orientation and other politically-charged topics, and regulate speech that denigrates LGBTQ students and other vulnerable populations.

We also include a selection of short pieces published in early 2017 as part of our Call for Conversations (CFC), in which we welcomed writings around the theme “Education in the Era of Trump.” Of the 33 pieces published online, we selected eight that embody the range of writings shared and the spectrum of voices represented. These include the poem For Girls Made of Fire, by a high school student, about the power of girls under the Trump administration. We also include reflections and essays on the important role that curriculum can play in combatting false and dangerous narratives, and there are additional pieces that speak to the particular experiences of undocumented families under a Trump administration. Our readers will find many more exceptional pieces posted online on our CFC blog, including concrete suggestions for teachers working with children of all ages.

Finally, we close with an interview between the Dean of the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, Prudence Carter, and UC Berkeley’s outgoing Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, Na’ilah Suad Nasir, recorded at the 2017 Graduate School of Education Research Day. Dean Carter and Professor Nasir explore the current and future state of educational research and consider both the role of the scholar and schools of education in that future. They discuss the institution of education and ways to improve certain aspects while simultaneously overhauling practices that perpetuate systemic inequities. They explain that the consideration of equity is crucial as we move forward in a diverse nation and world, and they challenge the broader community of educators (e.g., scholars, educators, administrators, and institutional leaders) to think about what equity means, what it looks like for different students and in

Editors’ Introduction

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different contexts, and implore this community of educators to consider how equity should inform relevant, meaningful research. They assert that to answer this call for equity, researchers must work collaboratively across disciplines and consider how their research translates to practice and informs the students and systems they seek to study and improve. *************** The Berkeley Review of Education invites pieces that continue and extend the conversations started by the authors in this issue as well as work that starts new conversations on issues related to equity and diversity. We encourage senior and emerging scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to submit articles that address issues of educational diversity and equity from various intra/interdisciplinary perspectives. The editorial board especially welcomes submissions that provide new and diverse perspectives on pressing issues impacting schools, educational systems, and other learning environments. We also welcome a broad range of “critical” scholarship. We define critical work as that which aims to analyze, evaluate, and examine power and dominant structures while helping us to imagine something new.

We thank the many people who have assisted in getting this issue to press: the authors, current and former board members, volunteers, reviewers, advisers, and the students and faculty members at the Graduate School of Education who have helped us in many other ways. We especially thank Dean Prudence Carter, Assistant Dean Alejandro Luna, and our faculty adviser, P. David Pearson, for their ongoing support and guidance as we broaden the scope and readership of the journal. Finally, we thank the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Education and Graduate Assembly for their generous financial support.

The Editors References Cuban, L. (1990). Reforming again, again, and again. Educational Researcher, 19(1), 3– 13. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X019001003 Hochschild, J. L., & Scovronick, N. (2003). The American dream and the public schools.

New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tyack, D., & Tobin, W. (1994). The “grammar” of schooling: Why has it been so hard to change? American Educational Research Journal, 31(3), 453–479. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312031003453

Â

Available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre

Minority Serving Institutions: A Data-Driven Student Landscape in the Outcomes-Based Funding Universe Marybeth Gasman,a1 Thai-Huy Nguyen,b Andrés Castro Samayoa,c and Daniel Corrald a

University of Pennsylvania b Seattle University c Boston College d University of Wisconsin-Madison

Abstract Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) emerged in response to a history of racial inequity and social injustice due to racial and ethnic minorities’ lack of access to Predominately White Institutions (PWIs). Enrolling 20% of the nation’s college students, MSIs are an integral part of U.S. higher education. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the contributions that MSIs are making to postsecondary education, specifically contributions related to performance with men of color; teacher education; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education; and outcomes measures within two-year MSIs. We use descriptive statistics from the National Center for Educational Statistics and the National Science Foundation to call for deep consideration of the unique mission MSIs serve, especially with regard to educating low-income students of color within the universe of outcomes and performance-based evaluation. We conclude with recommendations and implications for policy.

Keywords: Minority Serving Institutions, outcomes, accountability, performance

Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) emerged in response to a history of racial inequity and social injustice due to racial and ethnic minorities’ lack of access to Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), as well as significant demographic shifts over the past 40 years (Cunningham, Park, & Engle, 2014; Nuñez, Hurtado, & Calderón Galdeano, 2015). Today, even more significant demographic changes in the country have created clusters of racial and ethnic minorities throughout the nation and within college and university settings. Representing 20% of the nation’s college students, MSIs are now an integral part of U.S. higher education (Conrad & Gasman, 2015). Since the establishment of Cheyney University, a historically Black institution, in 1837, MSIs have represented a key point of access for those populations that have been legally and socially excluded from PWIs. In this article, we detail the ways in which widened access to opportunity in higher education has positively influenced areas that are considered vital at 1 Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to: Marybeth Gasman, Judy & Howard Berkowitz

Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, 3819 Chestnut Street, Suite 140, Philadelphia, PA, 19104. E-mail: mgasman@gse.upenn.edu.

Berkeley Review of Education

Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 5–24

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Gasman, Nguyen, Samayoa, & Corral

both the state and federal levels (Cunningham et al., 2014; Orfield, 2014). Rather than asking if and why MSIs matter in education and to the workforce, this article represents a response to how they matter. In the following sections, we offer an overview of the current literature focused on achievements in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, teacher preparation, and outcome measures (e.g., graduation rates) within the subset of two-year MSIs. Our overview of these areas connects to current trends calling for the diversification of the teaching profession, the need for graduates with competencies in STEM, and the value of attaining credentials offered by two-year colleges.

Literature Review MSIs consist of, but are not limited to, Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) (Cunningham et al., 2014; Merisotis & O’Brien, 1998; Teranishi, 2010). There are also numerous emerging MSI types, including Native American Serving Nontribal Institutions (NASNTIs), Predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs), and Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions (ANNHSIs) (Cunningham et al., 2014; Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, 2016; Rochet, 2015). These institutions have carved out a unique niche: serving the needs of low-income and underrepresented students of color. They offer diverse faculties and staffs, provide environments that greatly enhance student learning and develop leadership skills, offer learning spaces with same-race role models, address deficiencies in K–12 preparation of students, and ready students to thrive in the workforce and in graduate and professional education (Conrad & Gasman, 2015; Cunningham et al., 2014; Lundy-Wagner, Vultaggio, & Gasman, 2013; Merisotis & O’Brien, 1998; Nuñez et al., 2015).

MSIs enroll a substantial share of racial- and ethnic-minority students, many of whom might not otherwise attend college due to systemic discrimination. They offer educational opportunities that feature extensive student support services, effective developmental education, a family-like environment, and considerable knowledge pertaining specifically to the needs of low-income, first-generation students (Conrad & Gasman, 2015; Cunningham et al., 2014; Merisotis & O’Brien, 1998; Nuñez et al., 2015).

For this reason, the success of these institutions is essential for reaching our nation’s higher education and workforce goals. MSIs play a crucial role within the nation’s economy, especially with respect to elevating the workforce prospects of disadvantaged populations and reducing the underrepresentation of minorities in careers that require post-baccalaureate education and training (Conrad & Gasman, 2015; Cunningham et al., 2014; Freeman & Gasman, 2014; Gasman & Nguyen, 2014; Merisotis & O’Brien, 1998; Nuñez et al., 2015).

Despite these strengths, MSIs face considerable challenges. These institutions have tight operating budgets that allow them little flexibility in terms of faculty hiring, curriculum, and facilities enhancement (Cunningham et al., 2014; Merisotis, & O’Brien, 1998). Because of strict financial constraints, they often find it difficult to secure leaders who can effectively steward the institutions toward sustainability and long-term success.

Many MSIs have higher presidential turnovers than PWIs; MSI presidents average a six-

Minority Serving Institutions

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year term, whereas PWI presidents average an eight-year term (American Council on Education, 2015). MSIs also have, on average, lower graduation and retention rates than PWIs, due in part to their service of large numbers of first-generation, low-income, and underprepared students (Conrad & Gasman, 2015; Cunningham et al., 2014; Freeman & Gasman, 2014; Gasman & Nguyen, 2014; Merisotis & O’Brien, 1998; Nuñez et al., 2015). In essence, MSIs are asked to overcome larger barriers by supporting populations that are disproportionately disadvantaged using substantially fewer resources than their comparable PWIs (Gasman, 2007).

Given MSIs’ history of underfunding and vulnerable financial situations, these institutions face new challenges with emerging outcomes-based funding models at the state level (Conrad & Gasman, 2015; Cunningham et al., 2014; Gasman, 2007).

Moreover, the federal government’s focus on ranking colleges and universities through systems like the College Scorecard, a repository of earning outcomes for an institution’s graduates, has the potential to hurt MSIs if their contributions and service to low-income students of color are not fully understood (Cunningham et al., 2014; Gasman & Nguyen, 2014). Current trends in performance-based funding schemes rely on the data produced from national datasets (e.g., National Center for Education Statistics; NCES) that use constraining definitions for their variables. Until 2016, NCES counted only first-time degree seekers in their calculations for graduation rates. Metrics such as graduation rates are a common variable used in performance-based funding to state-affiliated colleges and universities (Jones et al., 2017). However, due to the distinct profile of students attending MSIs, many of whom transfer between or leave and re-enter institutions, such metrics lead to unfair judgments of these institutions’ success.

Of note, we differentiate between MSIs that were created with the express purpose of educating specific racial and ethnic groups and those that resulted from recent demographic shifts. Both HBCUs and TCUs were created to educate Black people and Native Americans, respectively. At their core, they have a mission to empower and uplift their students. Their curricula and corresponding co-curricular programs are typically aimed at providing culturally relevant learning experiences (Brayboy, Fann, Castagno, & Solyom, 2012; Cunningham et al., 2014; Gasman, 2007; Gasman & McMickens, 2010).

HSIs and AANAPISIs are different in their constitutions. Apart from three HSIs that were specifically founded to educate Hispanics, most HSIs earned this designation as the result of demographic shifts that led to higher concentrations of Hispanic students enrolling in existing post-secondary schools. There is also great diversity within HSIs in terms of race, ethnicity, class, religion, sexuality, etc., with some boasting student populations that are 98% Hispanic and others hovering near the 25% threshold that is required to earn HSI designation by federal standards (Conrad & Gasman, 2015; Cunningham et al., 2014; Gasman, 2007; Nuñez et al., 2015). However, many HSIs well exceed the federal requirements, with 43% (118) of all HSIs reporting Hispanic enrollment of 50% or greater. To earn AANAPISI 2 status, an institution must 2

On average, students of Asian descent perform better in higher education than all other racial groups.

Research (e.g., Teranishi, 2010) indicates, however, that the broad pan-ethnic term Asian is misleading in that it blurs the many differences that exist within Asian communities. For instance, without disaggregated data, few would know that the Hmong and Cambodian communities have college attainment rates well below the national average. Until federal agencies, such as NCES, can provide that level of detail, it will be challenging

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demonstrate that at least 10% of enrolled students are Asian American or Pacific Islander (AAPIs). Due to their enrollment profiles, 55 MSIs are eligible for both HSI and AANAPISI status.3 Many HSIs and AANAPISIs are embracing their federal designation, providing services focused on Latinos and AAPIs. One such example is California State University Fresno’s Full Circle Project, which is focused on increasing retention for AAPI students through programming directed by the school’s Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies programs. However, there are other institutions that do very little to uphold their designation and it is important to continue to hold these institutions accountable for their status as MSIs (Calderón Galdeano & Santiago, 2014; Cunningham et al., 2014; Nuñez et al., 2015; Teranishi, 2010). Some institutions may be encouraged to better serve their minority populations if the Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE), which manages the funding offered to institutions that are eligible for MSI designations, implemented a systematic way of reviewing the success of the grants awarded. With the exception of TCUs and HBCUs (whose numbers of eligible institutions remain static), all institutions deemed eligible by the OPE for MSI-specific funding (through Title III and Title V4) apply for competitive grants administered by OPE. Many of these grants provide up to five years of funding for these institutions.

Often, those writing about MSIs do not include data detailing the contributions of MSIs to various parts of society. Instead, they focus on overarching platitudes (Gasman, 2007). With this paper, we aim to contribute a data-driven perspective on the MSI landscape by providing a primer on the contributions of MSIs, revealing the ways in which MSIs are performing in general and across specific areas that have been deemed important at both the state and federal level. In so doing, the primer sheds light on the kinds of metrics that policymakers, OPE, and other funders may want to consider when judging the success of MSIs, particularly in response to policymakers’ concerns about MSIs’ performance with men of color, in teacher and STEM education, and within the two-year community college environment (Orfield, 2014). This primer provides evidence that MSIs’ contributions in these areas have considerable value.

We use descriptive statistics from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and National Science Foundation (NSF) to illustrate MSIs’ contributions and growing importance to society. We address the relationship between MSIs and the outcomes of men of color, the shortage of racial minorities in teacher education and STEM education, and their growing presence within the community college sector. Data

to make sense of how AANAPISIs serve underrepresented students.

3 The challenge with dual designation—in this case, institutions that are considered HSIs and AANAPISIs— stems from the question of analysis and the manner in which they should be treated in study designs. We suggest looking more closely at each of these institution types to better determine their tendency in serving either Hispanic or Asian students.

4 Title III helps eligible colleges and universities “to become self-sufficient and expand their capacity to serve low-income students by providing funds to improve and strengthen the academic quality, institutional management, and fiscal stability of eligible institutions” (U.S. Department of Education, n.d.-b, para. 1). Title V is the Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions (DHSI) Program and “provides grants to assist HSIs to expand educational opportunities for, and improve the attainment of, Hispanic students. These grants also enable HSIs to expand and enhance their academic offerings, program quality, and institutional stability” (U.S. Department of Education, n.d.-a, para. 1).

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presented also add to arguments that call for deep consideration of the unique mission that MSIs serve, especially with regard to educating low-income students of color within the universe of outcomes and performance-based evaluation.

Method We began this analytic process by using the database on MSIs provided by the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions (2016), as well as the more recent Eligibility Matrix for Minority Serving Institutions grants provided by OPE (2016), to construct a universe of MSIs in the United States. We used these institutional listings to create clusters of organizations––TCUs, HBCUs, AANAPISIs, and HSIs. (To view this universe with the cluster designations, see https://www2.gse.upenn.edu/cmsi/content/msidirectory.) Using these cluster designations as the primary unit of analysis, we disaggregated publicly available data on postsecondary education with particular attention to three areas: teacher education, STEM education, and two-year institutions.

Through this analysis, we examined the contributions that MSIs have made as reservoirs of students of color in these three areas, with attention to enrollment and completion data.

Data were collected from IPEDS and NSF’s Scientists and Engineers Data System. Given the comprehensive and descriptive nature of these statistics, we offer these key educational areas as illustrations of the importance of centering MSIs as a unit of analysis in research. Furthermore, this overview provides a pathway for future researchers who are interested in providing alternative points of departure for metrics used to diagnose institutions’ outcomes.

Findings and Discussion Minority Serving Institutions—By the Numbers MSIs account for 14% of all postsecondary institutions in the nation (OPE, 2016).

This point is critical if we want to understand the pivotal role these institutions play in educating people of color in the United States, given that they consistently enroll and graduate a disproportionate number of students of color. As of 2016, 481 institutions were eligible for one of the four primary designations as MSIs: 34 TCUs, 105 HBCUs, 301 HSIs, and 68 AANAPISIs.5 Given that over 50% of the students across all of these institutions receive Pell Grants and tuition is, on average, about half as much as that of comparable PWIs, MSIs are the most affordable avenue for students of color hailing from under-resourced backgrounds (Cunningham et al., 2014). As we document below, some of the lower costs can be attributed to the significant proportion of MSIs that are two-year colleges, whereas others are linked to MSIs having less developed infrastructure and, therefore, fewer expenses.

Uplifting Men of Color President Obama and his administration have focused on uplifting and drawing 5

Due to their demographics, a handful of institutions are eligible for both HSI and AANAPISI designation, thus accounting for the discrepancy between the total number of MSIs and the disaggregated number of institutions within each type of MSI designation.

10 Gasman, Nguyen, Samayoa, & Corral attention to the lives of men of color through the My Brother’s Keeper initiative.

Unfortunately, aside from a single line, MSIs were summarily left out from the report produced by the initiative’s task force (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). Leaving MSIs out of national discussions—save for a few HBCUs—is a grave mistake, as a large percentage of the gains of men of color are found in MSIs. Without attention to these important institutions, it is challenging to move men of color forward in greater numbers.

The role that MSIs play in educating men of color must be considered when both the state and federal governments are evaluating these institutions’ contributions. According to the U.S. Department of Education (2014), data indicate that boys and men of color are disproportionately at risk of not completing their college education. There are large disparities in academic preparation for boys and young men of color at all levels. For example, “Black and Latino males are conspicuously overrepresented on most indicators associated with risk and academic failure” (Fergus, Noguera, & Martin, 2014, p. 121). As a result of these circumstances, men of color are more likely to be the victims of violent crimes (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). Given these broader contexts, which are often used to describe the state of educational opportunities for men of color, focusing on the role that MSIs play in providing educational opportunities to men of color is critical, particularly given their enrollment trends. Based on Fall 2012 data, over 36% of men of color who are enrolled full-time in college are found at MSIs, and this number increases to nearly half (48.6%) of men of color when including part-time college enrollment.

Disaggregating enrollment data allows us to identify MSIs’ disproportionate enrollment of certain racial and ethnic groups. The number of students of specific racial/ethnic groups enrolled at MSIs are larger than one would expect for a group of institutions that constitute less than one fifth of all postsecondary institutions in the nation. For instance, of all male college students enrolled nationwide, MSIs enroll 52% of those who are Hispanic, 45% of those who are Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, 35.5% of those who are Asian American, 25% of those who are Black, and 22% of those who are American Indian and Alaskan Native men. (See Table 1 for a summary of men’s enrollment data.)

Enrollment proportions for men of color at MSIs are even higher when we consider part-time enrollments. These institutions enroll 69% of all Hispanic men, 67% of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander men, 60% of Asian American men, 28% of American Indian and Alaskan Native men, and 25% of Black men when including part-time enrollment. (See Table 1 for a summary of men’s part-time enrollment.)

As with enrollment, MSIs also demonstrate commendable labor in educating men of color, as evident in the percentages of degrees conferred. Of the 196,110 bachelor’s degrees conferred to men of color in 2011–2012, 24% (n = 47,066) were awarded by MSIs. Twenty-two percent (n = 50,829) of men of color with associate degrees earned them at MSIs. To provide context for these figures, it is important to note that MSIs conferred 13% of all bachelor’s degrees and 23% of all associate’s degrees in the nation in Fall 2012. Further data disaggregation demonstrates that, within MSIs, Asian American men earn 13.7% of the total bachelor’s degrees, which is 8% higher than Asian Americans at non-MSIs, where they represent only 5.7% of all degrees conferred. In fact, with the exception of whites, all racial groups have greater representation of bachelor’s degrees conferred at MSIs than at their non-MSI counterparts.

Non-MSIs

MSIs

All Institutions

Non-MSIs

744,261 (34%) 1,420,325 (66%)

2,164,586

916,907 (18%) 40,75,142 (82%)

All Institutions

MSIs

4,992,049

Institution Type

5,147 (28%) 12,919 (72%)

18,066

8,197 (22%) 29,008 (78%)

37,205

American Indian/ Alaskan Native Men

75,476 (61%) 48,805 (39%)

124,281

107,134 (35%) 194,712 (65%)

301,846

Asian American

83,013 (28%) 215,736 (72%)

298,749

147,318 (25%) 441,741 (75%)

589,059

Black/ AfricanAmerican

284,682 (69%) 125,505 (31%)

410,187

322,388 (52%) 303,127 (48%)

625,515

Hispanic

5447 (67%) 2661 (33%)

8,108

6,510 (45%) 8,004 (55%)

14,514

Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander

225,683 (21%) 870,991 (79%)

1,096,674

231,907 (8%) 2,627,765 (92%)

2,859,672

White

18,354 (40%) 27,957 (60%)

46,311

2,4537 (19%) 102,059 (81%)

126,596

Two or More Races

Note. Data are from the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics (2013). Percentages are the proportion of a given cell in relation to the total students in the specific racial/ethnic and student status categories. Percentages are rounded and may not equal 100.

PartTime Students

FullTime Students

Total Male Enrollment

Table 1 Men’s College Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity and Student Status, Fall 2012

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12 Gasman, Nguyen, Samayoa, & Corral

Promoting Teacher Education Institutions of higher education play a vital role in K–12 education by inspiring, instructing, and certifying the future teachers and leaders of the nation’s schools and school systems. As the demographics of the K–12 public school system reflect the nation’s racial diversity, there is a significant need to prepare more teachers of color, as demonstrated by the U.S. Department of Education (2016). Examining and strengthening the role that MSIs play in producing future racial-minority teachers should be a national imperative.

Evidence suggests that MSIs can play a significant role in preparing teachers of color from various racial and ethnic groups. Between July 1, 2012, and June 30, 2013, there were 106,580 bachelor’s degrees in education conferred in the United States. Of these, 11,289 were conferred by MSIs (14.5%). Of note, MSIs accounted for 51% of all bachelor’s degrees in education conferred to Hispanics, 42.7% for Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, 33% for Asians, and 30% for Black people and African Americans (U.S. Department of Education, 2013).

One illuminating statistic points to the need for higher-education institutions to increase their offerings in education to students of color; only 2% of teachers are Black men, as suggested by the National Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which has been explored in other work (Ginsberg, Gasman & Castro Samayoa, 2017). By graduating a large proportion of the nation’s racial-minority education majors, MSIs already play a significant role in diversifying the potential pool of candidates that enter the teaching profession, but they have the capability of contributing even more (Ginsberg et al., 2017).

In 2011–2012, 192 MSIs (36%) across 17 states and one U.S. territory (Puerto Rico) conferred bachelor’s degrees in education. Of these, 74 were HBCUs, 77 were HSIs, 36 were AANAPISIs, and nine were TCUs.6 Almost three quarters (72.55%) of all HBCUs confer bachelor’s degrees in education, but this percentage drops to a quarter for the other MSIs. In the emerging outcomes-based metrics used to judge the contributions and overall success of higher-education institutions, policymakers have typically focused on six-year graduation rates and graduates’ potential income earnings without consideration for the type of employment sectors where racial and ethnic diversity is needed. But given the consistent shortage of teachers of color in the K–12 sector (Ingersoll & May, 2011), and MSIs’ contribution to addressing this shortage, policymakers should reconsider what counts as a metric in emerging outcome-based rubrics. We suggest that, much like the rationale offered to support the advancement of underrepresented racial minorities in STEM (Carnevale, Smith, & Melton, 2011), supporting the diversification of the teaching profession is equally well-suited as a future metric of institutional success.

Success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics The continued security and health of our nation are contingent upon innovative discoveries in STEM that open new possibilities in technology, manufacturing, and healthcare. Colleges and universities are not producing sufficient numbers of STEM 6

Note, however, that there are four institutions with dual HSI/AANAPISI designations.

Minority Serving Institutions 13 graduates to satisfy the demands of our economy (Perna et al., 2009). Reports from prominent national and academic institutions (Carnevale et al., 2011; National Academy of Sciences, 2011) insist that improving the educational attainment of individuals from the most disadvantaged backgrounds (i.e., racial-minority students) is a solution for meeting this workforce demand. With their successful record of enrolling and graduating racial-minority students, MSIs should receive consideration and attention for their efforts in improving the representation of students of color in STEM. The underrepresentation of racial minorities in the STEM fields and workforce can be linked to challenges—or leaks—within the educational pipeline from early education through college. Racial minorities have fewer developmental opportunities—offered by well-resourced homes and schools rich with financial, social, and cultural capital—to strengthen and shape the skills, dispositions, and experiences needed for achievement in STEM (Massey, Charles, Lundy, & Fischer, 2011). For instance, enrollment in accelerated math and science courses in secondary school strongly influences students’ achievement in college-level STEM courses and their persistence through degree completion (Maltese & Tai, 2011; Tyson, Lee, Borman, & Hanson, 2007). Unfortunately, recent data from the U.S. Department of Education (2012) demonstrate that underrepresented minorities are less likely to be enrolled in college preparatory and Advanced Placement or honors-level courses, decreasing the likelihood of their success in STEM fields. This may explain why gains in racial-minority enrollment in postsecondary education in the past 30 years have not manifested into improved and equitable representation in the STEM workforce (Cannady, Greenwald, & Harris, 2014).

According to data from NSF (see Table 2), across all occupations in science and engineering, Hispanics account for 5% of all professionals, with Black people representing 5%, and American Indians or Alaskan Natives and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders representing less than 1%. Despite the fact that Asians are overrepresented at 18% of all professionals in science and engineering occupations, data that is disaggregated by ethnicity illuminates the struggles experienced by some communities within the Asian diaspora (Teranishi, 2010).

The unequal representation of minorities in the STEM workforce can be attributed to the types of postsecondary institutions students attend, as well as the quality of their collegiate experiences. Based on traditional measures of achievement in postsecondary STEM classes and statistics on baccalaureate degree completion in STEM fields, the performance of students of color is often perceived to be lower than that of their white counterparts (Riegle-Crumb & King, 2010). Although under-preparation at the secondary level can hinder students’ performance in STEM, several studies have suggested that, for students of color, the dynamics of the college environment may be the primary culprit affecting achievement (Alexander, Chen, & Grumbach, 2009; Seymour & Hewitt, 2000).

Racial-minority students—especially Hispanics and Black people—underperform in STEM when embedded in a competitive climate, commonly found at PWIs, that may undermine their confidence and sense of belonging (McClain, 2014; Seymour & Hewitt, 2000). In contrast, higher STEM achievement among racial-minority students is associated with climates that promote collaboration and feature an increased presence of minority peers and faculty mentors (Maton, Hrabowski, & Freeman, 2004). Notably, these conditions have been observed at several MSIs (Perna et al., 2009).

5% 5% 5% 2% 5% 6% 5% 5%

3,829,000 597,000 2,204,000 190,000 321,000 210,000 309,000 1,569,000 6,957,000 9,549,000

Science occupations Biological/Life scientist Computer and information scientist Mathematical scientist Physical scientist Psychologist Social scientist Engineering occupation

S&E-related occupations

Non-S&E occupations

0.3%

0.3%

* * * * * *

0.2% *

0.2%

0.3%

8%

11%

23% 19% 14% 3% 8% 17%

19% 19%

18%

12%

Asian

7%

6%

6% 4% 4% 5% 5% 4%

5% 3%

5%

6%

Black or African American

0.3%

0.4%

* * * * * *

0.2% *

0.2%

Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander 0.3%

75%

75%

65% 71% 76% 83% 80% 72%

69% 71%

70%

74%

White

1%

1%

2% * 2% 2% 2% 1%

2% 2%

1%

1%

More than One Race

Note. * = Suppressed for data confidentiality and reliability reason. S&E = science and engineering. Details may not add to totals because of rounding and suppression. Scientists and engineers are individuals with a bachelor's or higher degree living in the United States with an S&E-related degree or occupation.

Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin may be of any race. Data are from National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (2015b).

8%

6%

5%

5,398,000

S&E occupations

7%

21,903,000

Hispanic or Latino

All ethnicities and races

All Degrees

American Indian or Alaska Native

Table 2 Distribution of Employed Scientists and Engineers by Occupation, Ethnicity, and Race, 2010

14 Gasman, Nguyen, Samayoa, & Corral

Minority Serving Institutions 15 As with the conferring of education degrees, MSIs contribute disproportionately to STEM education for racial minorities. Table 3 7 shows the number of baccalaureate degrees across STEM fields awarded to Black people, Hispanics, and American Indians and Alaska Natives, and the percentage of graduates by each respective MSI. Despite making up less than 3% of all U.S. postsecondary institutions, HBCUs award nearly 17% of all baccalaureate degrees in the sciences to Black students. Of all Black graduates nationwide, 33% with degrees in the physical sciences and 19% with degrees in engineering graduated from an HBCU. Almost 37% of Hispanics who have earned a baccalaureate degree in science and engineering fields graduated from an HSI,8 despite HSIs making up less than 6% of U.S. colleges and universities. In the physical sciences and mathematics, respectively, HSIs graduated 37% of all Hispanic students. TCUs awarded 2% of those baccalaureate degrees earned by American Indians and Alaska Natives in science and engineering, almost 10% in the agricultural sciences, and nearly 3% in computer science, despite representing less than 0.5% of all postsecondary institutions in the United States. Put simply—based on absolute production of STEM graduates—MSIs, although small in number, are a formative and influential institutional force in shaping the opportunities and achievement of racial minorities in STEM. These degree conferral rates suggest that MSIs possess the resources to cultivate STEM achievement and talent in their student populations. At the institutional level, racial concordance between students, faculty, and staff is important to minority students’ sense of belonging and engagement in campus and academic life (Berger & Milem, 2000; Gasman, Hirschfeld, & Vultaggio, 2008). A large presence of racial-minority faculty may create a climate that is more sensitive to the achievements and struggles that their students are experiencing (Conrad & Gasman, 2015; Gasman et al., 2008), and a large presence of peers from similar backgrounds can minimizes the feelings of isolation and tokenism that are commonly experienced by minority students at PWIs (Love et al., 2009; McClain, 2014). Institutions like MSIs (e.g., HBCUs and TCUs)—by providing this racial concordance along with opportunities for research and engagement—appear to be developing a “culture of science” (Hurtado, Newman, Trang, & Chang, 2010, p. 7), encouraging students to develop scientific identities without neglecting their racial identities (Gasman & Nguyen, 2014; Perna et al, 2009). Given the nation’s need for additional STEM workers and the dearth of diversity in the STEM workforce, MSIs should be recognized and rewarded for the substantial role they play in the STEM arena.

7

AANAPISIs were not included in this discussion as STEM-related data was not available at the time of writing.

8 Instead of Hispanic Serving Institution, the NSF uses High Hispanic Enrollment because the only criterion used for inclusion was 25% or more Hispanic student enrollment. For the sake of cohesion, we have replaced NSF’s term with HSI. Note, however, that these terms are not equal since High Hispanic Enrollment does not beget Pell Grant eligibility.

16 Gasman, Nguyen, Samayoa, & Corral Table 3 Bachelor's Degrees Awarded in Science & Engineering by Select Racial/Ethnic Groups and Institutional Types Black

Hispanic

American Indian and Alaska Native

All fields S&E Science Agricultural sciences Biological sciences Computer sciences Earth, atmospheric, and ocean sciences Mathematical sciences Physical sciences Psychology Social sciences Engineering Non-S&E

172,868 49,683 46,465 704 7,073 4,847

176,699 58,146 50,973 1,407 8,891 4,210

10,743 3,411 3,102 213 576 231

119

323

47

964 1,305 12,709 18,744 3,218 123,185

1,277 1,428 13,353 20,084 7,173 118,553

58 87 711 1,179 309 7,332

Minority Serving Institutions All fields S&E Science Agricultural sciences Biological sciences Computer sciences Earth, atmospheric, and ocean sciences Mathematical sciences Physical sciences Psychology Social sciences Engineering Non-S&E

HBCU (%) 16.7 17.8 17.7 32.1 28.1 14.3

HSI (%) 37.0 33.8 33.3 26.8 37.9 29.0

TCU (%) 2.4 2.2 2.4 10.8 0.0 2.6

7.6

28.5

0.0

29.5 33.4 17.8 12.5 19.0 16.3

37.3 37.5 39.2 28.2 37.5 38.5

0.0 0.0 0.1 3.8 0.0 2.4

All Institutions

Note. HBCU = Historically Black Colleges and universities. HSI = Hispanic Serving Institutions. TCU = Tribal College & Universities. S&E = Science & Engineering. Data are based on degree-granting institutions eligible to participate in Title IV federal financial aid programs and do not match previously published data that were based on accredited higher education institutions. Data are from National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, special tabulations of U.S. Department of Education; National Center for Education Statistics: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, Completions Surveys, 2002-12 (National Science Foundation, 2015a).

Minority Serving Institutions 17 The Role of Two-Year Minority Serving Institutions Like four-year MSIs, many two-year institutions represent greater access to postsecondary education for racial minorities and low-income students. They provide a wide range of developmental education programs, award sub-baccalaureate credentials, and provide a pathway to four-year institutions, offering a swath of opportunities individuals may benefit from amid the increasing importance of higher education in the workforce. Of the 1,132 two-year colleges in the United States, 22% are designated MSIs (Nguyen et al., 2015). These two-year MSIs make up 46% of all MSIs. Despite the substantial presence of two-year colleges in American higher education, empirical work on MSIs in this sector is, to the best of our knowledge, scant (Nguyen et al., 2015). This paucity of empirical work is notable given the ongoing interest from foundations seeking to provide greater credentialing to individuals through programs like associate’s degrees and certificates. This section pulls together data from NCES (U.S. Department of Education, 2012) to discuss two-year colleges’ role in serving minority and low-income students. As documented in Table 4, two-year MSIs enroll a large proportion of students of color, suggesting that policymakers and foundations could better support these students by focusing their efforts on such institutions.

Although just 3% of two-year institutions identify as AANAPISIs, these institutions enroll 16% of all Asians and Pacific Islanders in the two-year system, and they award degrees to 40% of the same population. Two-year HBCUs represent 1% of all two-year institutions, but award degrees to 3% of the Black college student population. HSIs make up 7% of all two-year institutions, but enroll 28% of the Hispanic population and award degrees to 45% of all Hispanic students in two-year colleges. TCUs represent 1% of all two-year institutions, but enroll 3% and award degrees to 5% of all American Indian or Native Alaskan students in two-year colleges (Stull, Spyridakis, Gasman, Castro Samayoa, & Booker, 2015). Given the distinct mission of two-year institutions to serve student populations from a broader range of backgrounds than four-year institutions, the broad classification of MSIs—of which nearly half are two-year institutions—must be parsed out in future research. Such a significant number of two-year MSIs certainly warrants separate studies that examine their influence on student achievement (Nguyen et al., 2015).

Concluding Thoughts and Recommendations MSIs are beginning to gain attention for their work with low-income students and students of color; however, progress is slow. Because these institutions are diverse in nature and have fewer resources than PWIs, they struggle to bring attention to their strengths and challenges. In order to steer a steady course through the rough waters of outcomes-based funding, it is necessary for MSIs to garner attention for the unique role that they play in U.S. higher education.

Disregard for MSIs at the federal level, evidenced by a lack of increased funding under the Trump administration, will impede efforts to improve the overall educational attainment of the nation’s students. In this article, we have presented evidence suggesting MSIs can significantly advance the nation’s agenda on minority male achievement, diversify teacher education, and increase STEM graduates, especially through men of color’s enrollments in two-year higher-education institutions. Although many

18 Gasman, Nguyen, Samayoa, & Corral policymakers and funders turn to the most elite colleges and universities in our nation as leaders and exemplars of achievement, many of these institutions enroll low numbers of racial minorities. To address our most pressing issues in education, our data suggest that the nation should look to MSIs as potential partners. In order to do this, federal policymakers must consider different, and more appropriate, benchmarks of postsecondary success so as not to inherently privilege PWIs, especially those that are more resourced. Policymakers must recognize the historical and social context of MSIs as a collective of under-resourced institutions that serve students from impoverished communities. When assessing the potential of MSIs to elevate our nation’s education and workforce, we encourage leaders and policymakers to take a critical perspective on the ways in which comparisons between institutions can unfairly distribute federal resources.

Toward this end, we provide the following recommendations to policymakers, researchers, and practitioners.

Table 4 Enrollment of Undergraduate Students at Two-Year MSIs, By Type Institutions Number of institutions AANAPISI HBCU HSI TCU

81 13 170 20

% of all twoyear institutions 3% 1% 7% 1%

Enrollment Number of % of target target population population 199,938 16% 24,191 1% 844,355 28% 4,742 3%

Degrees Number % of target of target population population 19,670 40% 3,809 3% 67,602 45% 537 5%

Note. Data are from U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, IPEDS 12Month Enrollment and Completion Surveys, 2011–2012 (2016). The total number of two-year MSIs was 284.

These data are based on a combination of resources including U.S. Department of Education, as well as those belonging to corresponding policy and advocacy organization groups.

Policymakers MSIs, by virtue of their name, represent the mosaic of our nation’s racial and ethnic diversity. If policymakers want to invest in the education and economic opportunities of oft-forgotten populations, then MSIs are a prime target as they offer countless avenues for systematic change. When evaluating MSI performance, policymakers should consider the significant contributions they make in high-need areas, such as teacher education among men of color and increasing the number of racial minorities pursuing STEMrelated degrees. If MSIs are left out of national conversations, research and funding decisions will continue to privilege PWIs, which typically have more resources and serve fewer low-income students of color. In this way, ignoring the contributions and needs of MSIs reproduces and deepens the stratification and racial polarization of our society. To counteract the influence of racial stratification on minority student achievement, those with the power to make systemic change should look to MSIs for solutions to shortages of teachers of color and STEM workers.

Minority Serving Institutions 19 Elsewhere, we have argued that MSIs are often cast negatively under rubrics that do not account for their focus on serving students with educational backgrounds that other institutions deem unfit for success (Conrad & Gasman, 2015; Gasman, 2007). Our focus in this paper has been to showcase areas where MSIs continue to serve an important role in the national landscape. In doing so, we hope to cast a new light on areas (e.g., preparation of future educators) that are worth highlighting as valuable metrics that can be used to assess an institution beyond the six-year aggregate graduation rate and expected earning outcomes. MSIs have a track record of preparing students of color in education and STEM-related fields, especially those that work in minority communities after graduation. Lastly, we suggest that those at the state and federal level consider the richness of MSI student bodies—including part-time, transfer, and swirling (dropping in and out) students—when evaluating their graduation rates and overall performance.

These institutions have the student bodies of the future, not the past.

Researchers As MSIs represent the future of higher education, we suggest that more researchers consider including them in research studies. For too long, there has been a considerable stigma around conducting research related to institutions that serve low-income students and students of color (Conrad & Serlin, 2011). Researchers should consider examining MSIs’ success in teacher education programs, teacher placement, and teacher longevity rates, and use their practices to inform other practices throughout the nation. Researchers can also analyze the way STEM learning is structured to cultivate minority student achievement. Moreover, researchers would do a great service by examining the MSIs’ contributions to the health of their local communities through their teaching partnerships and their commitment to serve as resources for both their students and the broader public.

In doing so, we hope researchers can continue to expand upon the myriad positive outcomes emerging from these types of institutions—outcomes that are beyond the purview of current metrics to assess institutional performance.

Practitioners We suggest that MSIs build coalitions rather than operate in silos based on individual type (e.g., HBCUs, TCUs). Coalitions across different types of MSIs could showcase the positive contributions of MSIs, such as the data that we have outlined in this paper, to communicate their strengths and advocate for their common interests. We also suggest that practitioners cultivate pride in the MSI designation. The data we have provided demonstrate that MSIs continue to make strides in educating those who have the most to gain, even in the face of inhospitable financial times. To be called an MSI should be a mark of pride for institutions that model effective institutional resilience and capacity to transform the lives of racially diverse student bodies.

Author Biographies Marybeth Gasman is the Judy & Howard Berkowitz Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions.

20 Gasman, Nguyen, Samayoa, & Corral Thai-Huy Nguyen is Assistant Professor of Student Development Administration at Seattle University and senior research associate at the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions.

Andrés Castro Samayoa is Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He is a senior research associate at the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions.

Daniel Corral is a doctoral student in Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a research affiliate at the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions.

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Tyson, W., Lee, R., Borman, K. M., & Hanson, M. A. (2007). Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pathways: High school science and math coursework and postsecondary degree attainment. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 12(3), 243–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/10824660701601266 U.S. Department of Education. (n.d.-a). Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions program–Title V. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/programs/idueshsi/index.html U.S. Department of Education. (n.d.-b). Title III Part A programs–Strengthening institutions. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/programs/iduestitle3a/index.html U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. (2013). Digest of education statistics. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/2013menu_tables.asp U.S. Department of Education, My Brother’s Keeper Task Force (2014). My Brother’s Keeper task force report to the president. Retrieved from https://ojp.gov/fbnp/pdfs/mbkreport.pdf U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). (2016). 12-Month Enrollment and Completion Surveys, 2011–2012 [Table documentation for the IPEDS access database, 2011–2012, final release]. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/Section/accessdatabase/

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Available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre

Righting Technologies: How Large-Scale Assessment Can Foster a More Equitable Education System Nadia Behizadeha1 and Tom Liam Lynchb a

Georgia State University b Pace University

Abstract For the last century, the quality of large-scale assessment in the United States has been undermined by narrow educational theory and hindered by limitations in technology. As a result, poor assessment practices have encouraged low-level instructional practices that disparately affect students from the most disadvantaged communities and schools. In this historical and theoretical review, we examine the misalignment between educational theory and large-scale assessment practices that rely upon technology, using writing assessment as a case in point.

Drawing upon sociocultural theory and critical software studies as conceptual frameworks, we find that today’s software-powered technologies, although capable of taking progressive educational ideals to scale, have not been used for these purposes. Our proposed solution is to shift from using technologies to assess predetermined samples of evidence of learning to using technologies to facilitate complex and negotiated models of assessment. This solution would require policy shifts that honor the needs of various stakeholders in the assessment process. We offer a power-sharing concept called negotiated control that engages policymakers, educators, researchers, and community members in the assessment process.

Keywords: large-scale assessment, education technology, writing assessment, sociocultural theory, software

For over 20 years, U.S. presidential administrations—from Clinton to Obama—have made concerted attempts to use large-scale assessment to overhaul public K–12 education in the name of equity. Through the Goals 2000: Educate America Act in 1994, the Clinton administration sought to renovate large-scale assessment nationwide and invest in school-technology infrastructure. In 2009, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program earmarked over $4 billion to entice states and districts to reform schools from

1

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Dr. Nadia Behizadeh, College of Education and Human Development, Middle and Secondary Education, 30 Pryor Street, 6th floor, Atlanta, GA, 30303.

Email: nbehizadeh@gsu.edu.

Berkeley Review of Education

Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 25– 47

26 Behizadeh & Lynch the ground up by adopting reform strategies that included common assessment systems.

More recently, the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 continued the requirement of annual large-scale assessment for most grade levels in multiple subject areas. At the heart of these initiatives is a century-old belief that rigorous, large-scale assessment is key to ensuring that schools provide equal opportunities for all children to learn. Yet, time and time again, such initiatives seem to fall far short of their goals, utilizing a great deal of public funding and incurring incalculable opportunity costs (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Noguera & Wells, 2011).

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, policymakers––and many of the philanthropic institutions and companies whom they enlist as partners––define what it means to assess children’s learning in ways that are deeply rooted in turn-of-the-century United States.

We argue that one of the causes of policymakers’ failure to realize 21st century education reform lies in their own 19th century paradigm concerning large-scale assessment models. More specifically, we argue that what it means to assess children at scale was narrowly defined by industrial-age technologies and that policymakers have ironically calcified education in the name of unbridled innovation. Highlighting the interplay of theory, technology, and policy in creating an equitable large-scale assessment system, in this historical and theoretical review, we explore the history of large-scale assessment technologies and theories, new software capabilities, and policy supports for equitable, large-scale assessment. We then focus on the role of large-scale writing assessment practices as a case in point for how large-scale assessment might look different today, providing federal and state officials the accountability they demand while also being more equitable and sustainable at the local level.

Thorndike Versus Dewey: A Battle of Epistemologies Current theoretical tensions in large-scale assessment in the United States mirror historical tensions from almost a century ago. The history of American education has been framed as an early 20th century battle between Edward Thorndike and John Dewey, in which Thorndike wins (Lagemann, 1989; Tomlinson, 1997). Despite both scholars identifying with progressivism, their pedagogical stances were fundamentally divided.

Thorndike believed learning was epistemologically predetermined, whereas Dewey viewed learning as epistemologically negotiated. In epistemological negotiation, learning is process-based, and meaning is socially constructed in real-world settings via systematic problem-solving approaches. Epistemological negotiation is a key feature of sociocultural learning theories that situate the learner and the learning process within a unique social and cultural context (Behizadeh & Engelhard, 2011; Perry, 2012; Prior, 2006; Street & Lefstein, 2007). This context may include different languages (Behizadeh, 2014; Shohamy, 2013), different modes of communication (McGrail & McGrail, 2013; New London Group, 2000), and different cultural backgrounds (Irvine & Armento, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Paris, 2012). Sociocultural approaches to teaching and learning and increased educational equity can be linked by epistemological negotiation. In this negotiation, students bring their own knowledge, experiences, languages, and identities as valued resources for interpreting, critiquing, and making sense of texts and perspectives.

Dewey (1938) explained this negotiation of meaning, stating:

Righting Technologies 27 As an individual passes from one situation to another, his world, his environment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of one and the same world. What he has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which [sic] follow.

The process goes on as long as life and learning continue. (p. 42) What Dewey describes as an individual’s responsiveness to one’s world passing from “one situation to another” is fundamental to sociocultural learning. Sociocultural learning is the foundation for culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Paris, 2012), problem-posing education (Friere, 1970/2000), project- and problem-based learning (Markham, Larmer, & Ravitz, 2003), social justice education (Adams, 2016), and many more pedagogical approaches that have been lauded by the educational research community as a way to realize equitable education. In all of these pedagogies, learners actively make sense of the world and create new knowledge in relation to themselves and their lived experiences, requiring a process of epistemological negotiation.

In contrast to epistemological negotiation, epistemological predeterminism is a view of learning that focuses on gaining particular skills and knowledge without considering process or context. Epistemological predeterminism positions learning as individualistic, decontextualized, and product-based, where learning can be empirically sampled with psychometric instruments. In epistemologically predeterministic assessment practices, the “right” answer precedes student inquiry and defies critique—a view of knowledge creation that contrasts with Dewey’s view. The correctness of learning is often evaluated via simple scoring mechanisms, such as multiple choice questions or externally applied rubrics to timed essays. This view of learning corresponds with the banking method of education that treats students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge (Freire, 1970/2000), rather than as active producers of knowledge.

The differing epistemologies of Dewey and Thorndike, which we simplify for heuristic purposes, relate to the cult of efficiency (Holt, 1994; Yengo, 1964), a movement in education that drew upon business and management practices, as well as emerging methods of intellectual and mental achievement tests. According to Yengo: It is quite apparent that by 1928 John Dewey was disturbed and dissatisfied with the kind of science of education that was developing. The efficiency movement was no longer rendering more effective the mechanical aspects of the school as it appeared in 1917. Rather, a complete school of educational thought and practice was being established upon the principles of educational measurement and scientific management and was dignifying itself as being the science of education. (p. 40)

28 Behizadeh & Lynch Dewey was concerned that the cult of efficiency only measured existing knowledge and limited the creation of new knowledge (Yengo, 1964). Thorndike, however, embraced the efficiency movement and believed that creating efficient, objective measures for learning would improve U.S. education (Clifford, 1984).

The cult of efficiency was necessarily concerned with large-scale measures for learning. However, when taking a measure to scale, it is necessary to employ technology.

If Thorndike “won” the battle for U.S. education, it is, at least in part, because his epistemologically predeterministic, product-driven view of learning aligned easily with technologies or “conditioning elements” (Levin, 1956, p. 124) available at the time. For instance, intelligence testing relied on psychologists creating “expert” questions and answers that required only mass paper-based printing technologies, which were in abundance in the early 20th century (Giordano, 2007). As the introduction of basic computing devices in the mid-20th century allowed for more efficient forms of epistemologically predeterministic testing instruments, their use continued to spread.

If Dewey “lost,” it is partially due to the fact that available technologies in the 1910s and 1920s could not support taking his process-based sociocultural model to scale. The steely analogue machines of the early modern era could not handle Dewey’s pedagogical approach, which was one of epistemological negotiation and was fundamentally communicative in nature. Taking Deweyan sociocultural processes of negotiation and knowledge creation to scale did not translate easily at a time when communication technologies like telegraphs and telephones were just slowly taking root, and the country’s infrastructure was racing to catch up.

It was this key epistemological difference between Thorndike and Dewey that led one historian to claim that “Thorndike is the historical starting point for any study or analysis of modern educational technology” (Saettler, 2004, p. 56). Specifically, Saettler lists Thorndike’s scientific and technological achievements, including the performance of “extensive scientific studies of mental tests, scales of achievement, and textbooks” (p.

56). It is worth noting that Saettler refers to two kinds of technology. Explicitly, he refers to tests, scales, and textbooks as technologies. Implicitly, such technological instruments are themselves the products of industrial technologies like the printing press. Dewey, according to Saettler, was “destined for disappointment” because he “had too hastily destroyed the traditional instructional pattern without replacing it with something better” (p. 58). Saettler’s “something better” refers to Dewey’s inability to harness technology for the purpose of taking work to scale as Thorndike did. As the public school system continued to solidify in the new century, the need to assess students at scale only grew, and Thorndike’s testing solution directly affected the trajectory of American education (Giordano, 2007).

In the next sections, we explore policies and practices of large-scale assessment as they relate to available technologies, in order to suggest possibilities for aligning largescale assessment with Dewey’s view. However, before turning to policy, it is necessary to consider that the meaning of technology today is not what it was a century ago. Today, to refer to technology is to refer to software.

Righting Technologies 29 How Technology Has Changed, and Why Dewey Needed Software In the latter part of the 20th century, the history of educational technology underwent a revolutionary shift, as personal computers and the Internet became popularized. From 1995 to 2014, Internet access amongst American adults increased dramatically as virtually all aspects of society adapted to online and digital technologies (Fox & Rainie, 2014). In an effort to theorize and examine this digital revolution, media theorists and scholars from several fields recommended a focus not on technology but on software.

Although software can be a complex term to pin down (Frabetti, 2015), for present purposes, software refers not to digital products, applications, and services per se, but, rather, to software as interwoven human and programming languages executed by computers that make digital products, applications, and services possible. Although the development of software dates back to at least the 1950s (Tukey, 1958), widespread access to software via user-friendly devices and interfaces is much more recent (Manovich, 2001, 2013). Unlike older analogue technologies (like the industrial printing press), digital technologies, or more precisely software-powered technologies (Lynch, 2015b), have an active and agentic quality (Berry, 2011). They can be programmed to behave in ways that previous technologies could not. For example, consider the spellcheck functionality in word processing applications. When a user writes a word that does not exist in the computer’s dictionary, the application places a red squiggly line beneath the offending word. The agentic behavior occurs because the application is powered by software written to identify users’ incorrect spellings, using standard dictionaries that can be customized over time, and immediately flags perceived errors.

Such errors can even be automatically corrected. This is a far cry from non-digital technologies that are used to correct spelling, which consist of paper, ink, and a great deal of human intervention.

In addition to having an agentic quality, today’s software-powered technologies have made complex social communication ubiquitously available. Instead of the film projectors and room-sized computers of the past, we have software-powered technologies, such as interactive whiteboards, mobile phones and tablets, sophisticated information systems, and data dashboards. Software-powered technologies can now support the process of learning, not just the product. It is possible for educators to formatively assess collaborative learning, not just the accuracy of answers to multiplechoice questions. However, many of the most fervent and sincere calls for using software-powered technologies to reform education today—from policymakers, philanthropists, companies, and educators—continue to perpetuate the century-old paradigm that positions technology in epistemologically predeterministic ways. This positioning contradicts intentions to prepare students for a 21st century world that requires a more Deweyan form of epistemological negotiation inherent in collaborative, critical, and creative learning environments (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Trilling & Fadel, 2009; Wagner, 2012).

30 Behizadeh & Lynch Whereas the analogue technologies of a century ago demanded predeterministic assessment practices (i.e., paper-based exams requiring single correct answers), today’s software-powered technologies can deftly support negotiated learning at scale, which we can see when classrooms on different sides of the world video conference with each other to collaborate on projects. These new software-powered technologies are both ubiquitous and at times invisible. In terms of ubiquity, the use of new devices, software applications, and web-based tools has been clearly spreading in schools, with some high-profile initiatives in urban districts like Los Angeles, Newark, and New York City (Lynch, 2015a; Selwyn, 2014). At the same time, software-powered technologies are positioned less explicitly as tools to address district, state, and federal policymakers’ demands for quantitative data about students and teachers, which has led to a mostly hidden intricate world of information systems (Lynch, 2013, 2016; Ravitch, 2013; Taubman, 2009).

But there is a catch. Although software excels at facilitating negotiated interpersonal communication, it can also be used to reinforce predeterminism. One observes predeterminism in assessment as multiple-choice examinations and so-called personalized-learning products, which are increasingly being offered via computer labs.

However, although the ontology of software is capable of aligning with sociocultural models of learning, this does not imply that this is how software is positioned by policymakers or by private companies that develop products for districts. Rather, researchers of educational technology frequently conclude that the kinds of products used in schools perpetuate an approach to instruction and assessment that values single right answers, skill-and-drill activities, and low-level cognitive engagement (Buckingham, 2008; Cuban, 2001; Meier, 2005; Philip & Garcia, 2013; Selwyn, 2014). As the nature and ubiquity of technology has grown over the last two decades, the paradigm that frames how technology is actually used in instruction and assessment has hardly changed at all.

It is important to note that a paradigm shift to align assessment with Deweyan approaches to learning requires a concurrent policy shift that reduces the stakes associated with largescale assessment and includes more stakeholders in the assessment process.

A Policy Framework for Equitable Large-Scale Assessment Systems These theoretical origins of large-scale assessment and available industrial technologies have ingrained certain assumptions about how we assess students in public education. Although assessment practices have been the subject of critique for decades, seldom do critics fixate on the role that technologies play in the implementation of particular assessment approaches and the ideologies that undergird the assessment systems themselves (Giordano, 2007; Taubman, 2009). Based on our analyses thus far, theory and technology are available to support large-scale sociocultural assessment.

However, in addition to sound theory and technology, there is a third requirement for socioculturally sound assessment: enacting policy supports for epistemological negotiation in assessment. Building on past theory and research on assessment policy, we discuss two critical policies for sociocultural assessment that allow for epistemological negotiation: reducing stakes and negotiated control.

Righting Technologies 31 A Call for Reducing the Stakes High stakes means that assessment results are being used to make critical decisions about students or teachers, such as student retention, teacher evaluations, and/or merit pay. A large body of literature has documented the negative effects of high-stakes, standardized tests on student learning (Amrein & Berliner, 2003; Au, 2007; Au & Gourd, 2013; Bauer & Garcia, 2002; Haertel, Moss, Pullin, & Gee, 2008; Ketter & Pool, 2001; Madaus, 1994; Mintrop & Sunderman, 2009; Nichols, Berliner, & Noddings, 2007), calling into question the consequential validity of these assessment practices.

Consequential validity is determined by the impact of using a particular assessment practice in actual settings (Behizadeh & Engelhard, 2015). Mintrop and Sunderman (2009) thoroughly reviewed studies examining sanctions-driven accountability practices under No Child Left Behind, concluding that there were strong links between sanctions and narrowing the curriculum to test-taking preparation. They further concluded that these practices contributed to teachers focusing more on students nearing the proficiency category and less on those far below the proficiency category.

Even after No Child Left Behind, the stakes remained high. Despite the Obama administration’s support of innovative technology use for non-assessment purposes, such as 21st century skill development (e.g., Computer Science for All) and whole-school reform (e.g., Digital Promise, The League of Innovative Schools), the Race to the Top program continued to forcefully promote high-stakes, large-scale assessment practices (Lynch, 2015b), particularly through assessment requirements for states that adopted the Common Core State Standards (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2017). The more recent Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) has not done much to reduce the frequency of high-stakes, large-scale assessment. ESSA established minimum requirements for annual testing: annual reading and math testing for students in grades 3– 8; science assessment once during elementary, middle, and high school; and at least one interdisciplinary assessment in high school. Additionally, ESSA mandated that accountability systems be in place by the 2017–2018 school year (Sharp, 2016).

However, due to ESSA’s redistribution of authority from federal to state governments, large-scale assessment policy in the United States is currently in flux (Behizadeh & Pang, 2016). Thus, there is an opportunity to interrupt large-scale testing’s long history of objectifying students and teachers, from the use of IQ exams to classify and track students at the turn of the century, through Chapter I testing provisions in the 1960s (Madaus, 1994), to more recent waves of high-stakes testing. Despite policymakers’ best intentions, the past century of U.S. education is one in which largescale assessment practices have perpetuated rather than mitigated inequity in our schools, in part due to the corrupting influence of high stakes. Although software-powered technologies can now support epistemologically negotiated large-scale assessment, without reducing stakes, assessment systems will risk being corrupted just as past systems have been.

32 Behizadeh & Lynch A Call for Negotiated Control Once stakes have been reduced and students and teachers can focus on meaningful negotiation without fear of sanctions, we propose extending this negotiation process to those stakeholders—primarily educators and policymakers—who use assessment data to make decisions. A key question arises: How can we ensure that epistemologically negotiated assessment practices are legible (Scott, 1998) to stakeholders when the process of reducing complex and complicated phenomena is often destructive (Foucault, 1975/1995; Stimson, 2000) at the local level? First, we have to reframe how we think about reliability. Reliability need not be defined as a quantitative measure of the correlation among independent scores. Instead, reliability may be reframed as situated, such as through local consensus of qualified evaluators, including the peer-review process used in the academy (Moss, 1994). Second, extending this peer-review process to K–12 education, we envision teachers, instructional coaches, and potentially students participating in the evaluation process and providing input. Although epistemologically negotiated assessment practices that are supported by software can reduce learning to numbers and provide an analytic shortcut to representing student achievement––thus increasing legibility of outcomes for policymakers––these numbers will not be psychometrically reliable. Rather, they are hermeneutically reliable (Moss, 1994; Petruzzi, 2008), meaning that they represent a consensus derived from negotiation among qualified experts, primarily teachers.

We understand that this reframing of the assessment process requires extended timelines for discussion and negotiation of meaning (Freedman, 1993), yet the diversity of opinion generated through meaningful analysis of student work offers a richness of educational possibilities and opportunities for epistemological negotiation. When applied to the exemplar of writing assessment, negotiated reliability can be achieved through methods used in the past by Kentucky and Vermont for large-scale portfolio assessment, and used currently by the National Writing Project (2017), which consists of panels of local stakeholders reaching a consensus on writing quality.

We believe that advances in software-powered technologies can support large-scale epistemologically negotiated assessment systems so that rich processes of learning are accessible to all stakeholders, including policymakers. Also, epistemologically negotiated assessment systems that are supported by software can provide more legible assessment data for policymakers by allowing them to generate numerical representations of student learning without losing access to the negotiated processes of meaning-making that isolated numbers often obscure.

In addition to rebalancing the power of teachers and policymakers, negotiated control requires that the influence of profit-driven corporations be minimized. As Picciano and Spring (2013) make clear in their structural analysis of the relationship between public educational agencies and private enterprise, public agencies have grown accustomed to outsourcing the expert guidance and technical logistics needed for large-scale assessment.

Over time, the direction of assessment policy has tended to defer to whatever products companies can quickly provide, rather than to current educational theory and research on learning and assessment, hence supporting Thorndike’s alignment with the cult of efficiency. The result is that state and district officials who lack the expertise to design

Righting Technologies 33 and implement large-scale assessment systems become dependent on corporate partners with off-the-shelf products.

Picciano and Spring (2013) refer to the “education-industrial complex,” which they define as “a series of networks and alliances that strive to influence the creation or modification of policies at all levels of government consistent with views and ideas that support extensive uses of technology and are profitable for its members” (p. 8). The result is a mutually beneficial deference between policymakers and companies, where the policies created are circumscribed by the technologies that companies can provide at scale. In particular, it is especially profitable for companies to sell those products and systems, which they already have in place. This is especially true of software-powered technologies, in which profitability only occurs once they are developed and tested. After that, an increase in users only further increases company profits. If software is capable of more, its potential is seldom realized not only because the policies do not promote more socioculturally responsive uses, but also because the software-powered products that have already been developed are inherently more profitable than investing in developing new ones. Thus, corporations should be given much less control and educators much more.

Other scholars have proposed assessment procedures that connect to our idea of negotiated control. For example, in writing assessment, Huot (2002) reviewed proposals of multiple scholars who advocated for evaluation of writing using locally agreed-upon standards with some degree of external review or oversight (Allen, 1995; Berlak, 1992; Moss, 1994). Referring to Allen’s (1995) study, Huot noted, “His use of electronic communication points out the vast potential the Internet and the Web have in providing the linkage and access necessary to connect site-based, locally controlled assessment programs from various locations” (p. 106). Notice that the use of technology that Huot mentions is one in which software facilitates communication, an epistemological negotiation. In another proposal, Petruzzi (2008) suggested that “accountability reports to stakeholders could be ‘interpretive summaries,’ that use rhetorical reasoning rather than quantitative measures of objective data” (p. 239). We believe that software-powered technologies can help facilitate these proposals for negotiated control and that current federal policy under the Every Student Succeeds Act may support our proposals.

Linking theory, technology, and policy, a major shift in large-scale assessment practices is possible with the dominance of sociocultural theory, the emergence of software-powered technologies, and the passage of power-sharing federal legislation that may lead to reduced stakes and increased local participation. In the next section, we examine the intersections of theory, technology, and policy through a case study of largescale writing assessment. We close with examples of what negotiated control of writing assessment that is theoretically and technologically aligned with epistemological negotiation could look like.

34 Behizadeh & Lynch An Illustrative Case: Large-Scale Writing Assessment A comparison between two kinds of writing assessment technologies will help illustrate the problems and possibilities before us. Writing assessment offers an appropriate site of study for exploring large-scale assessment systems, in part due to the Common Core State Standards’ unique emphasis on literacy practices across the content areas. In fact, writing argument was one of the first pedagogical emphases to emerge from the initial Common Core rollout (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2012).

We consider portfolio assessment and on-demand essays assessment, also known as direct writing assessment (DWA), as realized in paper-based and software-powered versions in the United States.

Portfolio Assessment and E-Portfolios Portfolios were one of the major alternative assessment practices used in the 1990s for U.S. writing assessment. Bauer and Garcia (2002) summarized four major points of alternative assessment methods such as portfolios: Students and teachers should collaborate to select evidence of learning, multiple meanings should be honored, varied responses should be valued, and a student’s individual approach should be recognized.

Based on these features, portfolio assessment is more likely to align with epistemological negotiation.

According to Madaus (1994), equity for diverse students was one rationale for a switch from multiple choice assessment and DWA to so-called alternative assessment.

One reason for increased equity is the close alignment between a sociocultural construct of writing and portfolio assessment, which then encourages culturally relevant and engaging instructional practices (Behizadeh, 2014; Gordon, Engelhard, Gabrielson, & Bernknopf, 1996; Murphy & Yancey, 2008). Bauer and Garcia (2002) explained: The equity claim is based on the hope that students will have better access to instruction that meets their literacy needs (educational equity), to literacy assessment tools that reveal what they can and cannot do (assessment equity), and to greater voice in their literacy development (empowerment equity). (p.

464) In these statements, the authors posited that positive washback—the effects of an assessment on instruction—from alternative assessment, such as portfolios to instruction, is a major rationale for use, a finding echoed by Murphy and Yancey (2008) in their review of writing assessment research.

Unfortunately, despite claims for increased equity, the use of portfolios for largescale assessment has decreased dramatically in the United States, in large part due to concerns with reliability of scores (Koretz, Stecher, Klein, & McCaffrey, 1994; Murphy & Yancey, 2008). This issue directly connects to negotiated control. For example, in Vermont and Kentucky, the state governments enacted statewide portfolio assessment systems in the 1990s, yielding multiple positive results, including increased writing instruction, more attention to the process of writing, and increased quality of student writing (Callahan, 1999; Gearhart & Wolf, 1994; Koretz et al., 1994). Yet in both states, external review of the systems focused on low quantitative reliability statistics, meaning

Righting Technologies 35 there was a low correlation between independent scores by raters (Evaluation Center of Western Michigan University, 1995; Koretz et al., 1994). This concern overshadowed the positive effects of portfolio assessment, suggesting that the primary purpose of the assessment was as an accountability system serving policymakers rather than as a teaching and learning tool serving teachers and students. This conflict of purposes is embedded in a theoretical conflict between sociocultural and skill-oriented views of writing, yet is also a technological limitation in that past portfolios did not generate legible data on student achievement for stakeholders. In other words, the numbers generated by portfolio assessment could not easily be interpreted out of context. Yet recent advances in software-powered technologies paired with a heuristic conception of reliability could potentially resolve these issues by providing rich nuanced qualitative and quantitative data that can serve multiple purposes. We argue that these technologies can produce data that is legible to stakeholders and meaningful to educators and students.

More recently, in addition to paper-based portfolio systems, software-powered writing portfolios have become more heavily researched in schools and districts, although not at a state-wide level (Cambridge, Cambridge, & Yancey, 2009; Lorenzo & Ittelson, 2005; Yancey, 2009). Hamp-Lyons (2002) noted that computer-based portfolio assessment not only provides autonomy to writers, but also provides “multiple pathways for writers through the many pitfalls of tests” (p. 11). More importantly, Hamp-Lyons added, “The possibilities for computer-based writing assessment are not limited by the computer software but in [sic] what ‘the system’ (educational, financial, political) will allow” (p. 11). In historical practice, it seems e-portfolios have often served as digital filing cabinets. Advances in software-powered technologies, however, make it more possible than ever for a school to use digital writing portfolios as a way for students to submit multiple drafts of a composition—potentially even multimodal pieces that include video and visuals along with written text—and receive feedback from various family or community members active in these students’ lives.

A policy of negotiated control may be applied to writing assessment by, for example, inviting parents and community members to read and submit feedback on selected student writing that is digitally shared through an e-portfolio. This feedback could then be accessible to the student along with self-evaluations, reflections, and teacher and peer feedback. Connecting policy to technology, we envision software being employed to render this broad spectrum of meaningful feedback in visual displays that do more than reduce nuanced feedback and diverse perspectives to a number. Important for legibility, evaluators could still assign numbers to different portfolios in order to facilitate a quick review of a large data set by district, state, and federal policymakers. However, these numbers would be locally determined using local consensus, and stakeholders (again, representing a wide range of individuals) would have access to the full body of a student’s work, which can then be analyzed and discussed to generate better supports for teachers and students.

36 Behizadeh & Lynch On-Demand Essay Assessment and Automated Essay Scoring Writing as a contextualized sociocultural practice is firmly established as a dominant theory in the writing-research community, and alternative assessment such as portfolios had a brief moment of ascendance in the 1990s. Yet on-demand essay assessment, also referred to as DWA, has been the dominant form of writing assessment in the United States for many decades (Behizadeh & Pang, 2016; Hamp-Lyons, 2002). In on-demand essay assessment, students are given a random prompt and a set amount of time, and essays are externally scored at a testing center on a rubric that is either holistic (i.e., one number represents an overall impression of the piece) or analytic (i.e., a set of numbers is used to represent different aspects of writing) (Hillocks, 2002; Huot, 2002). Although they admit that the practice is superior to multiple-choice tests, critics of on-demand essay assessment practices articulate two main issues. The first issue is lack of authenticity/validity or, as it is sometimes called in the field of educational measurement, ecological validity. The second issue is washback, referring to the effects of on-demand essay assessment practices on teaching (Hamp-Lyons, 2002).

In terms of negotiated control, the entire on-demand essay assessment process is outsourced, either to private assessment companies or to teachers who have no relationship with students, thus limiting teachers’ control of the system. Behizadeh and Pang (2016) found that 46 out of 50 states used external scoring processes for writing assessment with no involvement of the classroom teacher. In terms of instructional benefits, on-demand essay assessment does not purport to benefit instruction in the same way as portfolio assessment. Because on-demand essay assessments are a one-time, impromptu, timed test, the focus is not on the process of writing, thoughtful revision, and reflection. Rather, an on-demand essay assessment is separated from the curricular, instructional, and sociocultural context of a student’s learning. As a result, it captures only what an individual student can produce on a random topic in a limited amount of time, aligning this method more with epistemological predeterminism than epistemological negotiation.

Regarding technology, the software-powered counterpart to on-demand essay assessment is automated essay scoring (AES). AES received much media attention recently when reports emerged that AES could quickly and cheaply score large numbers of student essays with accuracy rates comparable to human scorers (Shermis, 2014; Shermis & Burstein, 2003), an affordance highly valued by policymakers with limited funds at their disposal. In AES, software is used to read student writing, develop a quantitative and categorical profile of the written work based on a bank of human-scored writing samples, and render a numerical score and pre-written qualitative feedback to students. Referring to a study by Shermis (2014) on the performance of nine AES vendors in the United States, Perelman (2014) critiqued Shermis’ claim that AES can reliably replace human scorers in high-stakes assessment contexts. In Perelman’s analysis, he found that “the study’s raw data provide clear and irrefutable evidence that Automated Essay Scoring engines grossly and consistently over-privilege essay length in computing student writing scores” (p. 104). This conflation of essay length with writing skill could have enormous negative washback to writing instruction, including encouraging “bloated and vapid prose” (p. 110). Other automated scoring processes that rely on more complicated analyses, such as latent semantic analysis (Landauer,

Righting Technologies 37 McNamara, Dennis, & Kintsch, 2013), may offer an approach for automated scoring that, to some extent, takes meaning into account. However, these scoring processes are essentially mathematical programs analyzing a writer’s text. In AES, software is generally being harnessed to scale epistemological predeterminism, functioning as little more than a linguistic bean counter.

Righting Theory and Technology: Negotiation Through Software-Powered Technologies The two cases of large-scale writing assessment above offer timely and relevant sites of study to better understand how the theoretical stances of epistemological predeterminism and epistemological negotiation operate in education. Both epistemological predeterminism and negotiation honor the pragmatic need to identify the essential knowledge and skills that students are expected to learn in advance. As a result, neither stance disaffirms the use of quality learning standards that are created by expert educators at the state and local level. The heart of the distinction between the two concepts lies in what they accept as sufficient evidence of student learning.

For epistemological negotiation, in the case of portfolio assessment and e-portfolios, students are assessed based on their ability to negotiate meaning over a sustained writing process, and the writing process includes examination of audience, genre, and purpose.

What students express is not a single decontextualized response, but evidence from multiple kinds of writing assignments over time. The process of portfolio assessment includes frequent forms of low-stakes feedback on drafts where students can take risks because doing so is a valued element of negotiation. The use of technology to support portfolio assessment, which we refer to as e-portfolios, can be used to accentuate the negotiative quality of this assessment practice. When software-powered technology is used to improve the efficiency of students’ writing processes, including the receipt of frequent low-stakes feedback, its use supports epistemological negotiation.

In contrast, on-demand essay assessment and AES place lesser value on the process and greater value on the final product as assessed through rubrics. The use of rubrics embodies epistemological predeterminism when used in the rapid assessment of ondemand writing, as is so often the case in large-scale writing assessment. For instance, Hillocks (2002) recounts stories of on-demand essay assessment raters who felt that they needed to undermine their true evaluation of student writing in order to conform to the rigid guidelines imposed by the testing center. In this way, the human rater is acting as little more than a machine. In such cases, the rigidity of the rubric’s language and the numerical values associated with such language creates a situation where students cannot be assessed on their ability to negotiate meaning but rather must comply with narrowly defined predetermined expectations in a single final product.

AES can be used to make predeterministic assessment more efficient in terms of time and money. Software can be programmed to read students’ typed essays, compare them against a bank of pre-scored essays, and algorithmically generate a score. It is important

38 Behizadeh & Lynch that the prompts offered to students are consistent in order for such assessment systems to work. That is, students receive identical questions, and their answers must be similar.

Epistemological predeterminism is operationalized not only in the standardization of the prompts, but also through the rubrics used and eventually through the algorithms encoded into software (Lynch, 2015a).

When one considers the emphasis today on 21st century skills for college and career readiness, the above examples illuminate how far current assessment practices are from assessing such skills. In the past, on-demand essay assessment and AES gained prominence because they were perceived to be the best technologies available to assess writing at scale. Such assessment practices promoted epistemologically predeterministic approaches to education, albeit to a lesser degree than multiple choice tests. On-demand essay assessment perpetuates a Thorndikean assessment philosophy that can be executed at scale, rather than a Deweyan ideal that has historically defied operationalization.

Nevertheless, on-demand essay assessment was the best assessment technology available at the time.

Today, we have available software-powered technologies that can facilitate the assessment of epistemological negotiation at scale. In the case of digital writing portfolios, software could be positioned to facilitate communication between different stakeholders in a manner that reinforces the integrity of the writing and learning processes as one of negotiated meaning-making. We have the opportunity to finally break from 19th century models of learning and assessment that we have inherited and perpetuated for over a century. Based on our analyses, we suggest software-powered eportfolios as a future direction for large-scale writing assessment and potentially other content areas as well.

Promising Software-Powered Assessment Systems Specifically looking at portfolios or rich tasks that utilize software-powered technologies, such as in the New Basics project (Klenowski, 2011; Lingard & McGregor, 2014), we highlight a few examples of promising assessment systems. One is the Scholar system developed by Bill Cope (Cope, 2013; Cope & Kalantzis, 2017; see http://info.cgscholar.com/) that includes a community space similar to popular social media sites; a creator space for writers to create work and review others’ work; a publisher function that has revising and publishing tools that can be applied to multiple products; and an analytics function for data-mining and assessing the process and products of writing. Although it is currently being used for college writing, Scholar could be a possibility for large-scale portfolio assessment in elementary through high school and in multiple content areas.

A second promising example is the work of Patrick Griffin on the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project (AT21CS; Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills, 2012; Griffin, 2015), which is currently in a final development stage.

According to Griffin (2015), this project will use technology in innovative ways that support collaboration, creativity, criticality, and problem-solving. Additionally, Griffin states that AT21CS will provide “detailed time-stamped data capturing the activities of collaborators” and “log stream and chat stream data for modeling and evaluating student activity” (p. ix). Yet the success of these new software-powered technologies when used

Righting Technologies 39 in large-scale K–12 school settings will depend on the quality of their use. Without negotiated control and lowered stakes, these systems could become yet another top-down reform that does not allow for epistemological negotiation for students. Therefore, any promising technology that allows for epistemological negotiation needs to be paired with negotiated control and stakes reduction.

In addition to these systems that are designed for widespread use, as briefly referenced earlier, there are also simpler software-powered technologies that could be used by teams of teachers or individual schools to design their own negotiated assessment system. These include cloud services like Google Docs (Dunn, Luke, & Nassar, 2013; Godwin-Jones, 2008) and manuscript review systems, such as ScholarOne (see http://scholarone.com/products/manuscript/), that allow for collaborative writing and review, which could include writing across content areas, such as descriptions of problem-solving approaches in math. Districts and states could then use a sampling system to review student work and provide feedback to professional development to strengthen these homegrown systems and share outstanding examples with other educators.

Although the bulk of research on large-scale portfolio assessment centers on writing, scholarship indicates similar promise for supporting epistemological negotiation in science (Chang & Tseng, 2009; Gunay & Ogan-Bekiroglu, 2014; Valdez, 2001), social studies (Ugodulunwa & Wakjissa, 2015), and math (Helton, 1994; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2016). For example, in their experimental study of physics portfolios, Gunay and Ogan-Bekiroglu concluded that portfolio assessment was not only effective for assessing student growth in physics, but that it also helped students learn physics. However, there appeared to be scant research on e-portfolios in these other content areas, and future research is needed to design and study the effects of large-scale e-portfolio assessment in multiple content areas and in interdisciplinary ways that combine content areas.

Using already available and easily accessible tools, a next step in our research is to develop and pilot an alternative system that builds on past national and international writing assessment systems (Calfee & Perfumo, 1996; Callahan, 1999; Cambridge et al., 2009; Cumming & Maxwell, 2004; Gearhart & Wolf, 1994; Koretz et al., 1994; Lorenzo & Ittelson, 2005; Mills & McGregor, 2016) and that meets our recommendations for socioculturally sound and technologically powerful assessment. We hope other researchers in science, math, social studies, foreign language, and other content areas will take up this charge to create e-portfolio assessment systems that are powerful supports for teaching and learning, and persuasive and legible to district and state policymakers.

Conclusion Twenty years ago, equity concerns were a primary force for revising assessment (Madaus, 1994), and equity concerns should still be the guiding force behind assessment reform. The disparate impact of high-stakes testing on minoritized groups is a civil rights

40 Behizadeh & Lynch issue, one that this nation must attend to if we are to live up to our democratic ideals. As Darling-Hammond (2010) has argued, “low-income students of color have been the primary victims of high-stakes testing policies” (p. 74). If there is reason to hope, and we believe there is, it is because the kinds of pedagogies and assessment practices that software-powered technologies can support at scale align with calls for 21st century skills, the philosophies of Dewey, and the work of other researchers who have built upon Dewey’s research. Epistemological negotiation of learning supported by software, freed by reduced stakes, and supported by negotiated control, may be a way to address the continued inequities of current testing practices.

Although it is critical to recognize students’ lived realities through open-ended assessment structures, and to allow students and other stakeholders to participate in the assessment process, it is important that these changes, and all of the suggested assessment reforms for which we advocate, be paired with social supports for high-poverty students and families and investments in high-poverty communities (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Noguera, 2003). Although we center our work in this piece on addressing current inequities of U.S. schooling from within, we cannot emphasize enough the importance of federal and state investments in alleviating conditions associated with poverty. Until the United States can narrow the gap between the rich and the poor, closing the opportunity gap between the high- and low-performing will continue to be a very difficult if not insurmountable task.

Reconfiguring responsibilities among administrators, teachers, district and state officials, students, and community members, through assessment policies built on the concept of negotiated control, is just one positive step that must be paired with a holistic approach to supporting high-poverty communities. As Noguera (2003) stressed in his research on urban schools, “we must stop pretending that we can avoid confronting and addressing urban conditions as we try to devise strategies for improving urban schools” (p. 144). As educational researchers, we need to be careful not to get stuck flying at too high of an “algorithmic altitude” (Lynch, 2015b, p. 94), where we forget that the real work of education reform is in having our feet on the ground and our actual bodies in spaces where we can engage with those whom we aim to serve.

In order for the United States to be a global leader, its public schools must provide more than basic skills education. We need all students to be prepared for life and work in the 21st century, which requires critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving, all of which are processes that are connected to negotiating meaning rather than regurgitating facts. Anyone can look up a fact in seconds using the affordances of various search engines and applications. Yet humanity faces a multitude of serious problems for which readily available answers do not exist and must be negotiated on a national or even global scale. These problems include continuing conflict in war-torn regions, and climate change due to an increasing population and unfettered consumption of fossil fuels. These complex issues will require the next generation to work together to balance the sometimes contradictory needs and desires of multiple nations, states, and communities.

Shifting writing assessment practice from DWA to writing portfolios that rely on negotiated control of content and assessment processes could seem like a distant solution to the pressing problems of today. However, assessment can be a powerful tool for reshaping how students learn and teachers teach. It is high time to leverage software-

Righting Technologies 41 powered technologies to bring to scale the assessment practices, and consequently the pedagogies, that are more socioculturally responsive to our students and communities, and, as Dewey argued over a century ago, truer to the democratic ideals that should drive education. It is Dewey’s century to win, computer in hand.

Author Biographies Dr. Nadia Behizadeh is Assistant Professor of Adolescent Literacy in the Department of Middle and Secondary Education at Georgia State University. Her research interests include authentic and culturally sustaining writing instruction for youth, problem- and project-based literacy learning, sociocultural writing assessment, validity of writing assessment, and social justice teacher education. Dr. Behizadeh’s current research project examines access to powerful writing pedagogy in urban, public schools, and is funded by the Spencer Foundation and the Conference on English Education.

Tom Liam Lynch is Assistant Professor of Educational Technology at Pace University in Manhattan. A former English teacher and school district official for the New York City Department of Education, Dr. Lynch led the implementation of a $50 million online/blended learning program in over 100 schools called iLearnNYC. He also designed and guided the initial implementation of WeTeachNYC, a digital resource repository and learning environment for the city’s approximately 80,000 teachers. Dr. Lynch researches the relationship between software theory, literacy, and education, most recently examining the relationship between K–12 computer science education and literacy studies.

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Homophobic Expression in K–12 Public Schools: Legal and Policy Considerations Involving Speech that Denigrates Others Suzanne E. Eckes1 Indiana University

Abstract This article examines an education policy matter that involves homophobic speech in public schools. Using legal research methods, two federal circuit court opinions that have examined the tension surrounding anti-LGBTQ student expression are analyzed. This legal analysis provides non-lawyers some insight into the current realities of student speech jurisprudence in public schools and offers school leaders guidance about how they might address speech that denigrates other students. It also proposes how courts might reconsider analyzing homophobic expression in public schools under existing precedent.

Keywords: LGBTQ, law, educational policy, speech, First Amendment

The undoubted freedom to advocate unpopular and controversial views in schools and classrooms must be balanced against the society’s countervailing interest in teaching students the boundaries of socially appropriate behavior.

––Bethel Sch. Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 1986, p. 681 The law continues to play “an increasingly significant role” (McCarthy, 2016, p. 565) in education policy. From Yale to Berkeley, universities are currently debating the limits of the First Amendment on campus (Fuller & Saul, 2017; Kristoff, 2015). At the same time, K–12 public schools continue to grapple with the scope of students’ First Amendment rights (Balakit, 2015). Complex questions often arise in courts and classrooms when student speech denigrates other students.2 For example, imagine that a student wears a Confederate flag T-shirt with the slogan “White Pride” during a schoolsponsored Black History Month celebration. What if a student wears a swastika button during a religious tolerance day or a homophobic T-shirt on the National Day of Silence?

1

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Suzanne E. Eckes, Professor, Indiana University, 201 N. Rose Ave, 4234 Wendell Wright, Bloomington, IN 47405. Email: seckes@indiana.edu.

The author would like to thank David Schimmel (Professor Emeritus at UMass Amherst) for his thoughtful feedback on this article.

2 For the purposes of this article, speech that denigrates has been defined as injurious speech that attacks members of a minority group who have been historically marginalized. This type of expression makes students feel inferior, intimidates them, and/or attacks their core being; it is speech that is wholly inconsistent with the school’s mission.

Berkeley Review of Education

Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 49–80

50 Eckes Would school officials be able to prohibit this expression? Students who wear such shirts might argue that they have the right, under the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause, to offer another viewpoint. They might also contend that they have the First Amendment right to express their sincerely held religious beliefs in public schools, even if that speech denigrates racial, religious, or sexual minorities. Courts across the country are deciding such cases and affecting education policy in K–12 public schools. As will be discussed, courts are bound by legal precedent, and these opinions do not always equate to good education policy (Chemerinsky, 2003; Superfine, 2009).

When examining these complicated legal and policy issues, K–12 public school officials must be careful to give students the ability to become thoughtful and politically active citizens; they must tread lightly on limiting students’ right to free expression. As Justice Brennan observed in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), “[t]he vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools. The classroom is peculiarly the marketplace of ideas” (p. 512; quoting Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 1967, p. 603). However, although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate” (Tinker, 1969, p. 506), First Amendment rights for public school students are not absolute. The Court has noted that speech involving K–12 students is different and, accordingly, has afforded more leeway to school officials when attending to students’ developmental and psychological needs.

As a result, courts have consistently held that students’ constitutional rights are not as extensive as the rights afforded to adults in other settings (see Bethel Sch. Dist. No. 403 v.

Fraser, 1986), as public schools are a unique sphere. For example, in the school context, “the level of disturbance required to justify official intervention is relatively lower in a public school than it might be on a street corner” (Karp v. Becken, 1973, p. 175). Thus, “expressions [that] are constitutionally permitted in newspapers, public parks, and on the street” might be controlled in a public school because “[p]ublic school students cannot simply decide not to go to school” (concurring opinion, Defoe v. Spiva, 2010, p. 338).

Significance This article will examine the legal and policy considerations surrounding one particular speech issue: homophobic expression in K–12 public schools. The topic is especially timely, as the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that the U.S. Constitution guarantees a right to marriage equality under both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). Although the Obergefell decision addresses marriage, there are certainly some implications for public schools and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students. A legalaffairs reporter from Education Week contended that the marriage equality opinion “holds various implications for the nation’s schools, including in the areas of employee benefits, parental rights of access, and the effect on school atmosphere for gay youths” (Walsh, 2015, p. 1), and others have written about how the decision will likely impact school climate for LGBTQ students (Adams, 2015; Lewis, Walsh, & Eckes, 2016).

Further, there are renewed debates about the limits of speech that may stigmatize others on college campuses (Kristoff, 2015) and in K–12 schools (Embree, 2014).

Likewise, state governments are examining issues (sometimes under the First

Homophobic Expression 51 Amendment) regarding whether to exempt businesses from serving LGBTQ individuals.

Public school students also continue to organize “anti-gay” days in public schools (see e.g., Middleton, 2015; “Students Stir Controversy,” 2014). For example, in 2016, students in California and Connecticut wore anti-gay stickers and shirts with rainbows with lines through them; school officials struggled with the appropriate response (Associated Press, 2016).

Although the legal literature has widely addressed issues involving offensive speech in K–12 public schools (e.g., Bowman, 2007; Conover, 2015; Curtis, 2009; Gilreath, 2009; Harvard Law Review, 2014; Houle, 2008; Lee, 2014; Macias, 2012; McCarthy, 2009a, 2009b; Taylor, 2009), education policy and leadership journals have not fully analyzed these issues. The education literature has clearly documented the high levels of harassment LGBTQ students experience in schools and the negative impact that this has on students’ emotional and academic well-being (Huebner, Rebchook, & Kegeles, 2004; Kosciw, Greytak, Bartkiewicz, Boesen, & Palmer, 2012; Levasseur, Kelvin, & Grosskopf, 2013); the higher suicide rates involving gay teens (American Association of Suicidology, n.d; Kann et al., 2016); and the legal issues involving LGBTQ harassment and bullying (Biegel, 2010; Kimmel, 2016). However, fewer education articles focus on the legal parameters involving anti-LGBTQ speech in school. Similarly, only a limited number of education researchers have examined the role of courts in influencing education policy around students’ expression rights involving anti-LGBTQ speech (e.g., Biegel & Kuehl, 2010; Fetter-Harrott, 2014; McCarthy, 2009a, 2009b).

Questions The U.S. Supreme Court has not addressed the specific issue of homophobic speech in the K–12 context, but two federal circuit courts have done so. These circuit court cases, from 2007 and 2011, are the focus of this study, and although they are not recent cases, the increased attention on LGBTQ rights, as mentioned above, makes this analysis particularly relevant. As will be discussed, one federal circuit court upheld school officials’ decision to prohibit anti-LGBTQ speech, while the other federal circuit court permitted such speech. This study seeks to address this gap in the education research by answering two questions: (a) How have the federal circuit courts analyzed anti-LGBTQ speech in K–12 public schools? and (b) What is the current status of the law for school officials who might be interested in adopting policies that prohibit anti-LGBTQ speech in public schools?

Several education law scholars argue that school personnel need to understand the law in order to create equitable environments in schools (e.g., Decker, 2014; Heubert, 1997; McCarthy, 2016). Decker (2014) observes that “as educators learn about the law and the legal system, they become empowered to influence education policy within and outside their classrooms, buildings, and districts” (p. 683). Accordingly, this analysis will provide non-lawyers, including school personnel, some insight into the current realities of student speech jurisprudence in public schools. I also discuss how courts might analyze

52 Eckes this issue through existing precedent while considering the special context of K–12 public schools.3 Organization of the Study First, to set the legal context regarding speech that denigrates students, I discuss the four U.S. Supreme Court decisions that directly focus on K–12 student expression, relevant lower court opinions addressing speech that disparages students, and selected viewpoint discrimination4 cases. In legal research, scholars use court decisions to document the historical progression and current status of the law involving a specific area of jurisprudence. Thus, instead of a traditional literature review, I provide a case review to examine the four U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have directly involved K–12 student speech in public schools and the lower court decisions that have analyzed student speech that stigmatizes others. Because there are few court opinions that address antiLGBTQ speech in schools, I examine lower court opinions focused on racially hostile and anti-religious speech in public schools in order to learn how speech that denigrates students on account of their sexual orientations might be curtailed. As McCarthy (2016) observed, “The Supreme Court’s decisions influence the contours of our rights and every aspect of the law, which school personnel need to comprehend” (p. 575).

Next, I use legal research methods to review and examine the federal circuit court decisions addressing homophobic or anti-LGBTQ speech in schools. I then analyze the findings of the cases reviewed, which suggest that there is both a conflict in the courts when addressing anti-LGBTQ speech in public schools and a lack of guidance for school officials. Next, I argue why, based on existing precedent, courts should permit publicschool officials to craft policies that curtail denigrating and injurious commentary related to sexual orientation under existing precedent. Alternatively, courts might consider creating another exception within the existing case law that would grant school officials the ability to curtail speech that demeans students in public schools. Finally, I stress how it is possible to maintain important current protections for students’ political speech and speech related to critical social issues.

The Four U.S. Supreme Court Decisions Involving Student Speech The U.S. Supreme Court has permitted four exceptions that limit students’ free expression rights in public schools. These four Court cases provide important context that applies specifically to K–12 student expression jurisprudence. Thus, the cases serve as guidance to school officials who are interested in creating policies that prohibit speech that denigrates students in public schools.

Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist.

In Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist. (1969), the Court examined whether school officials violated the First Amendment rights of students who were suspended for wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. The Court ruled that there

3

The information in this article is not legal advice.

Viewpoint discrimination occurs when the government favors one opinion or a particular controversy over another.

4

Homophobic Expression 53 was no evidence that the armbands created a material and substantial disruption in the school. It also found that, when the students wore armbands, they were not interfering or colliding “with the rights of other students to be secure and to be let alone” (p. 508). As such, students’ private political speech is protected unless it creates a material and substantial disruption in the school (i.e., Tinker’s first prong) and/or if it collides with the rights of others (i.e., Tinker’s second prong). I examine Tinker’s first and second prongs throughout this article. It should be noted, however, that Tinker’s first prong concerning disruption is relied upon much more frequently than the second prong in cases involving student expression.

Bethel Sch. Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser Over 15 years later, in Bethel Sch. Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser (1986), the Supreme Court analyzed whether school officials could curtail a student’s speech at a school-sponsored assembly. The case concerned a student who used an explicit sexual metaphor when speaking about a friend who was running for student council. The student was suspended for two days and sued the district under the First Amendment. Noting the difference between the political speech in Tinker and the sexual language in this speech, the Court ruled in favor of the school district, observing that “schools, as instruments of the state, may determine that the essential lessons of civil, mature conduct cannot be conveyed in a school that tolerates lewd, indecent, offensive speech and conduct such as . . . Fraser’s . . . plainly offensive [speech]” (p. 683). Moreover, the Court stressed that [p]ublic education must prepare pupils for citizenship in the Republic. . . . It must inculcate the habits and manners of civility as values in themselves conducive to happiness and as indispensable to the practice of self-government in the community and the nation. (p. 681) Thus, according to the Court, school officials have the authority to decide “what manner of speech in the classroom or in school assembly is inappropriate” (p. 683) and teach “students the boundaries of socially appropriate behavior” (p. 681). And, although we must tolerate “divergent political and religious views . . . we must also take into account consideration of the sensibilities of others, and, in the case of a school, the sensibilities of fellow students” (p. 681).

Hazelwood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier Two years after Fraser, in Hazelwood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier (1988), students contended that their principal violated their First Amendment rights when he censored two pages of the school newspaper that included stories about teen pregnancy and the impact of divorce on students. The principal was concerned that students would be able to identify which pregnant students and divorced parents were discussed in the articles.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the school district, finding “that educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns” (p. 273). The Court also observed that students’ rights “must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school

54 Eckes environment” and that school officials need not tolerate expression that is inconsistent with the school’s basic educational mission (p. 266). Hazelwood addressed schoolsponsored speech, which is quite different from student-initiated speech, the focus of the Tinker and Fraser cases. However, as will be discussed below, some courts have relied on Hazelwood in prohibiting student-initiated speech.

Morse v. Frederick Finally, Morse v. Frederick (2007) concerned a student who unfurled a banner at a school-sponsored event that said, “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” When he refused to remove the banner, the principal took it and suspended him. The student then sued under the First Amendment, claiming there was no evidence that the banner caused a disruption, as required by Tinker’s first prong. In this ruling, the Supreme Court held that school officials may discipline student speech at school-sponsored events that they reasonably view as promoting illegal drug use. Moreover, the Court observed that school officials must sometimes take reasonable “steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care” (p. 397) and that “schools may regulate some speech even though the government could not censor similar speech outside of the school” (p. 406). The case distinguished political speech from speech that relates to physical safety. The Court also reiterated the special nature of the public school setting, where students’ constitutional rights are different from those of adults and where the Court “cannot disregard the schools’ custodial and tutelary responsibility of children” (p. 406). The concurring opinion argued that Morse was a narrow decision applying only to cases involving advocacy for illegal drug use, and that it should not be extended to speech related to social or political issues. This opinion thus raised questions about the meaning of Fraser. However, as will be discussed, not all lower courts have interpreted Morse so narrowly.

Applying the Precedent School officials have attempted to navigate these four student expression cases when creating policies that impact student speech. In doing so, many districts have policies that prohibit speech that would likely cause a disruption in the school or speech that is considered highly offensive or lewd. These types of policies often target speech that could be considered racist, homophobic, or anti-religious. For example, one school district in Illinois prohibited “derogatory comments,” oral or written, “that refer to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability” (Nuxoll v. Indiana Prairie Sch. Dist., 2008, p. 670). However, in some cases, such policies have been struck down in lower courts, which has led to inconsistent outcomes across jurisdictions.

Other Considerations Other U.S. Supreme Court decisions are related to the issue of free speech in K–12 schools. For example, Waldron (2012) highlighted how the Supreme Court upheld prohibitions on speech that denigrates minority groups in a non-school case. In Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952), the Court upheld a state law that prohibited the White Circle League, a white supremacist group, from distributing false or malicious defamation against nondominant racial and religious groups in public places. As Waldron

Homophobic Expression 55 suggested, courts might also consider Beauharnais in controversies involving K–12 speech that is deemed malicious against racial minorities, religious groups, and LGBTQ students. However, although decisions such as Beauharnais could be informative, the four U.S. Supreme Court cases on K–12 student speech discussed above remain the focus of this paper.

Relevant Lower Court Decisions Involving Speech that Denigrates Other Students Several recent examples arising in schools (e.g., T-shirts that say “Build the Wall”) raise questions around the contours of students’ right to free speech in schools. This section discusses illustrative lower court cases that involve speech that might be considered to denigrate others in K–12 public schools. Most of the decisions involve racially hostile speech while a few include religiously hostile speech. The outcomes of these cases could inform school leaders examining the issue of anti-LGBTQ speech in public schools.

Racially Hostile Speech From recent controversies in South Carolina about the Confederate flag to Confederate statues in New Orleans and Charlottesville, a national discussion about state symbols that many find offensive has been reignited. Although the Confederate flag may invoke pride over the Civil War or could signify honor for one’s ancestors who fought in the war, many students might find the symbol representative of racial hostility. Therefore, there has been much controversy in U.S. public schools involving apparel depicting the Confederate flag.

Several lower courts have examined student expression with regard to Confederate flags, and these decisions provide some insight about how schools might address homophobic expression. To illustrate, the Eleventh Circuit (Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) Court of Appeals compared the flag to slogans such as “Blacks should be slaves” or “Blacks are inferior” (Scott v. Sch. Bd of Alachua Cnty., 2003, pp. 1248–1249).

Further, in a recent Fourth Circuit (Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia) Court of Appeals case, a middle school student wore various Confederate flag shirts to school depicting messages such as “Honorary Member of the FBI: Federal Bigot Institutions” and “Jesus and the Confederate Battle Flag: Banned from Our Schools but Forever in Our Hearts” (Hardwick v. Heyward, 2013). Another shirt depicted an American flag and the words, “[f]lew over legalized slavery for 90 years!”

School personnel asked the student to change her shirt, and when she refused, she was suspended for one day.

The student filed a lawsuit alleging that she had a First Amendment right to wear the shirts because they expressed her heritage and religious faith. In a unanimous decision, relying on Tinker, the circuit court upheld the district court’s opinion that a student’s right to free speech can be curtailed as long as school officials have evidence allowing them to reasonably forecast a substantial disruption. The court posited that the history of racial tension in the school district provided adequate evidence, even though much of the racial tension in the district had subsided by the time of this case (Eckes & Minear, 2014). For example, in the 1980s, in response to an interracial couple who attended prom

56 Eckes together, several white students wore Confederate flags and Black students wore clothing depicting Malcolm X. Furthermore, in the 1990s, two students set a historic Black church on fire and another student drove his truck, which sported a Confederate flag, through the school parking lot. Thus, according to the Fourth Circuit, the history of racial tension in the district justified school officials’ actions, as the shirts could cause a substantial disruption under Tinker. With regard to viewpoint discrimination, the Fourth Circuit reasoned that the school’s policy did not specifically target a Confederate flag or any other viewpoint. The school’s policy was therefore found to be viewpoint-neutral.

According to the court, [a]lthough students’ expression of their views and opinions is an important part of the educational process and receives some First Amendment protection, the right of students to speak in school is limited by the need for school officials to ensure order, protect the rights of other students, and promote the school’s educational mission. (p. 444) In a more recent decision, another circuit court also prohibited a T-shirt based on school officials’ ability to reasonably forecast a disruption. In 2014, the Ninth Circuit (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) upheld a California high school’s decision to ban students from wearing American flag shirts on Cinco de Mayo because the shirts reasonably led school officials to forecast a substantial disruption and possible race-related violence (see Dariano v.

Morgan Hill Unified Sch. Dist., 2014). To illustrate, within the past six years, the principal witnessed 30 fights between gangs and between white and Hispanic students.

The students’ First Amendment claims failed because, as permitted by Tinker, school officials based their decisions on the possibility of violence, and, therefore, they were acting to protect students. Relatedly, the court recognized that speech that collides with the rights of other students can also be prohibited under Tinker’s second prong.

Not all courts have taken the same approach. For example, in 2001, the Sixth Circuit (Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee) did not find any evidence of disruption as a result of a T-shirt featuring a country singer on the front and a Confederate flag on the back. The court also stressed that school officials may have engaged in viewpoint discrimination by banning the Confederate flag and not simultaneously prohibiting clothing depicting other racially charged images (e.g., Malcolm X T-shirts; Castorina v.

Madison Cnty. Sch. Bd., 2001). A few other federal district courts have also struck down bans on Confederate flags when no disruption was present (see e.g., Bragg v. Swanson, 2005; Glowacki v. Howell Pub. Sch. Dist., 2013).

However, more recent Sixth Circuit decisions upheld school officials’ decisions to prohibit the Confederate flag symbol on clothing. In a 2008 opinion, students who wanted to express their Southern heritage were prohibited from wearing Confederate flag apparel. The court held that school officials, under Tinker, could reasonably forecast that the racially charged symbol would create a substantial or material disruption in this school. Interestingly, the court also recognized that school officials could still prohibit the symbol without needing to forecast disruption (Barr v. Lafon, 2008). In this case, the principal told two students to remove their Confederate flag T-shirts or face suspension.

The principal based his decision on conversations with students and parents who

Homophobic Expression 57 indicated that they felt taunted by the flag and were fearful for their safety. In making its determination, the court relied upon Tinker, finding that school officials can regulate speech that materially interferes with “school work” and “discipline” (pp. 563–564).

Likewise, in 2010, the Sixth Circuit again permitted school officials, under Tinker, to suspend a student for wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt in violation of the school’s dress-code policy (Defoe v. Spiva, 2010). The court also posited that Tinker’s second prong allows a limitation on free speech when such speech interferes with the work of the school or would “impinge upon the rights of other students” or the right “to be secure and let alone” (p. 334). The court argued that school officials could reasonably forecast a substantial disruption, but two judges, in a concurring opinion, held that it was not necessary for school officials to reasonably forecast disruption in cases involving racially hostile speech. The concurring opinion stated that “[e]xpressions of racial hostility can be controlled in public schools even if students in the attacked racial group happen to be mature, good-natured, or slow to react. Schools are places of learning and not cauldrons for racial conflict” (p. 338). Further, the court found no viewpoint-discrimination problem because the school banned all racial or ethnic slurs and symbols, not only Confederate flags. The Fifth and Eighth Circuits have also upheld bans involving the Confederate flag if past incidents involving race could reasonably lead school officials to predict that it would cause a substantial disruption (see e.g., A.M. v. Cash, 2009; B.W.A. v. Farmington R-7 Sch. Dist., 2009).

Although most courts have applied the Tinker case in Confederate flag cases, an Eleventh Circuit opinion relied on the U.S. Supreme Court decision from Bethel v. Fraser (1986). Denno v. Sch. Bd. of Volusia Cnty. (2000) concerned a high school student who was suspended for showing a small Confederate flag to friends at school. The student, who had developed a keen interest in the Civil War and participated in Civil War enactments, was suspended for nine days and sued school officials under the First Amendment. This court reasoned that Fraser allowed school officials to prohibit highly offensive speech even without evidence of disruption. In addition, the court found that the flag symbol is perceived by some as offensive and constituting a racist message, and held that Fraser permits “teaching students the boundaries of socially appropriate behavior” (Denno, 2000, p. 1271, citing Fraser, p. 681). The court also posited that the “cultivation of the ‘habits and manners of civility’” that Fraser held “essential to a democratic society” may call for a level of parent-like guidance in a school setting that ordinarily “has no place in a public forum” (Denno, 2000, p. 1272, citing Fraser, p. 681).

Three years later, the Eleventh Circuit again relied on both Tinker (disruption) and Fraser (inculcating habits and manners of civility) in upholding the right of school officials to ban students from wearing Confederate flags (Scott v. Sch. Bd of Alachua Cnty., 2003). In fact, the court observed that even if disruption is not immediately likely, school officials can still discipline the speech under Fraser if the speech is highly offensive to others.

The Tenth Circuit (Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming) similarly relied on elements of Tinker, Fraser, and Hazelwood when it found that a student’s First Amendment rights had not been violated. The middle school student in this case was disciplined for drawing a Confederate flag during math class (West v. Derby Unified Sch. Dist. No. 260, 2000). In addition to applying Tinker’s substantial disruption

58 Eckes test, the Tenth Circuit recognized that Tinker’s second prong (i.e., the rights of students to be secure and let alone) is also applicable in student speech cases. Citing Tinker, the court explained that school authorities can limit student expression that might “substantially interfere with the work of the school or impinge upon the rights of other students” (p.

1366). In referencing both Fraser and Hazelwood, the court also pointed out that students’ speech rights in public school are not as extensive as those of adults in other settings.

Based on the Confederate flag discussion above, it is clear that sometimes courts take different approaches (e.g., employing Tinker instead of Fraser) to reach similar outcomes (e.g., finding that the school district did not violate students’ First Amendment rights).

Most courts rely on Tinker and permit school officials to ban racially hostile speech if it creates a substantial disruption or when school officials can reasonably forecast the disruption (Barr v. Lafon, 2008; Dariano v. Morgan Hill Unified Sch. Dist., 2014; Hardwick v. Heyward, 2013), and districts with a history of racial tension will generally have an easier case (Barr v. LaFon, 2008; Dariano v. Morgan Hill Unified Sch. Dist., 2014; Hardwick v. Heyward, 2013). However, whereas some circuits applied Tinker’s first prong, others recognized Tinker’s second prong: the Sixth Circuit (Barr and concurring opinion in Defoe), the Ninth Circuit (Dariano), and the Tenth Circuit (West, 2000). Although not discussed above, the Fourth Circuit also relied on Tinker’s second prong in a student internet speech case involving a student severely ridiculing another (see Kowalski v. Berkley Cnty. Schs., 2011). Finally, although most circuits relied on Tinker, the Eleventh Circuit cited Fraser in the Denno and Scott decisions, ruling that student speech that is considered highly offensive could also be limited, even if no disruption was present.

Anti-Religious Speech Around the country, anti-religious speech in public schools has been an issue, but there is not a lot of case law (Hensker, 2009). Similar to racially hostile speech, court opinions related to anti-religious speech provide some insight into how anti-LGBTQ speech in public schools could be analyzed. For example, in Florida, which falls within the Eleventh Circuit, a student was prohibited from wearing a T-shirt that said “Islam is of the Devil” to his public school. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defended the student, arguing that the student’s expression should be protected. The federal court denied the student’s motion for a preliminary injunction for mootness, finding that the school’s revised policy was consistent with other anti-discrimination policies in workplaces. The school’s revised policy prohibited “clothing or accessories that . . . denigrate or promote discrimination for or against an individual or group on the basis of age, color, disability, national origin, sexual orientation, race, religion, or gender” (p. 12).

Citing the Morse decision, the court reasoned that the policy was consistent with furthering governmental and pedagogical interests (Sapp v. Sch. Bd., 2010). In a later proceeding, which granted the school district’s motion for summary judgment, the court again stressed that school officials may perform the traditional function of inculcating the habits and manners of civility (Sapp v. Sch. Bd., 2011), and they need not wait for a disruption to occur. The federal district court reasoned:

Homophobic Expression 59 “Islam is of the Devil” presents a highly confrontational message. It is akin to saying that the religion of Islam is evil and that all of its followers will go to hell.

The message is not conducive to civil discourse on religious issues; nor is it appropriate for school generally. Part of a public school's mission must be to teach students of differing races, creeds and colors to engage each other in civil terms rather than in terms of debate highly offensive or highly threatening to others. (p. 10) Consistent with some of the the racially hostile speech cases discussed earlier, this court did not require a disruption to occur before the speech could be limited.

Similarly, Boroff v. Van Wert (2000) concerned an Ohio student who, after wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt on five separate days, was told by school officials to refrain from doing so. According to the court record, Marilyn Manson is known as a Satan worshipper. One of the shirts worn depicted a three-face Jesus with the words “See No Truth. Hear No Truth. Speak No Truth.” The word “BELIEVE” was written on the back of the shirt with the letters “LIE” highlighted. The principal found all the shirts to be problematic, noting that the distorted Jesus figure was offensive and “mocking any religious figure is contrary to our educational mission which is to be respectful of others and others’ beliefs” (p. 472). The Sixth Circuit, relying on Fraser, held that school officials did not act unreasonably when prohibiting these shirts, stressing that school officials can prohibit shirts that include “symbols and words that promote values that are so patently contrary to the school’s educational mission” (p. 470).

However, in a subsequent decision, a federal district court in Ohio, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Sixth Circuit, granted a student’s motion for an injunction, which allowed him to wear a shirt that stated the following on the front: “INTOLERANT Jesus said . . . I am the way, the truth and the life. John 14:6.” The back of the shirt included the following statements: “Homosexuality is a sin!; Islam is a lie!; Abortion is murder!; Some issues are just black and white!” (Nixon v. N. Local Sch. Dist. Bd. of Educ., 2005, p. 967). The court found no evidence of disruption or a reasonable likelihood of disruption. According to the court, Fraser did not apply as it did in Boroff because the student’s shirt was not plainly offensive.

In analyzing anti-religious speech, the federal district court in Florida relied on Morse, the Sixth Circuit cited Fraser, and the federal district court in Ohio (within the jurisdiction of the Sixth Circuit) used Tinker. Interestingly, also within the Sixth Circuit, a picture of a three-headed Jesus (in Boroff) was found offensive, but a shirt reading “Islam is a lie!” (in Nixon, 2005) was not. As cases are very fact-specific, the Sixth Circuit’s lack of consistency when analyzing student speech cases is not new—there were also conflicting opinions about speech related to Confederate flags (Castorina permitted the flag, whereas Barr and Defoe did not). These inconsistent outcomes make creating education policies especially difficult.

Viewpoint Discrimination and Other Related Matters If a school allows students to organize the National Day of Silence to promote awareness about LGBTQ bullying, must school officials permit students to wear anti

60 Eckes LGBTQ shirts? If a school district permits students to organize a religious tolerance day, must it also allow students who are opposed to this day to wear swastikas? If a school sponsors an assembly focused on the Black Lives Matter movement, must school officials likewise allow students to wear “White Lives Matter” shirts to school that day?

These questions raise concerns related to viewpoint discrimination.

Viewpoint Discrimination By banning racially hostile, homophobic, or anti-religious speech in public schools, some courts have warned that school officials run the risk of engaging in viewpoint discrimination (see Nuxoll v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist, 2008). The U.S. Supreme Court has explained that a total ban on the use of “odious racial epithets” by “proponents of all views” (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 1992, p. 391) equates to a mere content-based regulation, whereas a ban on the use of racial epithets by one group of speakers, but not those speakers’ opponents, equates to viewpoint discrimination. Specifically, viewpoint discrimination occurs when the government (e.g., a school policy) prohibits speech by particular speakers and, in so doing, suppresses a particular view. But avoiding viewpoint discrimination is complicated, and it is not clear from the case law whether viewpoint discrimination must always be prohibited in the K–12 setting. Thus, it is unclear whether school officials must permit students the right––oftentimes based on religious beliefs––to debate whether God condemns Black people, Buddhists, or gays in a public school.

The Tinker Court held that a public school cannot prohibit “expression of particular opinion” (Tinker, 1969, p. 511), unless it makes a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons. According to Tinker, a particular viewpoint could be banned if it creates a substantial disruption, if school officials could reasonably forecast a disruption, or if it impinges on the rights of others. However, several court decisions suggest that questions remain about whether prohibitions on student expression must wait for a substantial disruption and whether expression must be viewpoint-neutral in K–12 public schools in order not to violate the First Amendment. For example, the Fourth Circuit observed that “[t]he Supreme Court has not expressly discussed the relationship between viewpoint discrimination and student speech” (Hardwick v. Heyward, 2013, p. 442). The Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits have raised similar concerns about the applicability of viewpoint discrimination in K–12 settings (B.W.A. v. Farmington R-7 Sch. Dist., 2009; Harper v. Poway, 2006a; Morgan v. Swanson, 2011). Also, in a concurring opinion, a judge in the Seventh Circuit argued that Tinker was not even a viewpoint-discrimination case because it revealed “nothing about whether the school allowed symbols or other expressions of opinions favorable to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War” (Nuxoll v.

Indian Prairie Sch. Dist., 2008, p. 677).

The issue of viewpoint discrimination has been directly addressed in a highereducation case, but it remains unclear how the case would apply in the K–12 context. To illustrate, in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va. (1995), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the university discriminated on the basis of religious editorial viewpoints when it denied funding to assist with the printing costs of a student newspaper that had a religious perspective. The Court ruled that the government is generally prohibited from regulating speech “when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction” (p. 829). Rosenberger invokes the notion

Homophobic Expression 61 of viewpoint discrimination in highlighting that the government is forbidden from favoring one speaker over another. However, in his dissenting opinion, Justice Souter asserted that there was no viewpoint discrimination involved in Rosenberger because the university’s policy discriminated against an entire class of viewpoints. Specifically, the university’s policy excluded all speech that manifested a belief in one deity, which applied equally to every religion (including agnostics). As such, the university’s policy did not skew the debate either for or against religion.

Although the Rosenberger decision is informative, student expression in K–12 public schools is not always subject to the same rules that apply in other circumstances. Indeed, student speech is more protected within higher education and within the public sphere because students are generally more sensitive to injurious remarks than adults are. Along these same lines, courts have also drawn a distinction between higher education and K– 12 students because the latter are considered a captive audience with impressionable minds (see e.g., Hardwick v. Heyward, 2013; Harper v. Poway, 2006a). For example, the Hazelwood (1988) Court observed, The First Amendment rights of students in public schools are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings, and must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment. A school need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school. (p.

266) Similarly, Post (1996) wrote in the Yale Law Journal that the state is permitted to regulate speech in public schools for purposes of education.

Thus, it is not surprising that courts are split about how Rosenberger alters the analysis of Tinker (see Hardwick v. Heyward, 2013). The Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits suggest that the public K–12 school setting is fundamentally different from a public-university setting when viewpoint discrimination is at issue (see B.W.A. v.

Farmington R-7 Sch. Dist., 2009; Hardwick v. Heyward, 2013; Harper v. Poway, 2006a; Morgan v. Swanson, 2011). The Sixth Circuit has sometimes taken another approach, holding that when public K–12 school officials regulate student speech, it must be consistent with both the Tinker standard and Rosenberger’s prohibition on viewpoint discrimination (see Barr v. Lafon, 2008; Castorina v. Madison Cnty. Sch. Bd, 2001).

Although Rosenberger’s reach remains unsettled, an increasing number of courts suggest that schools can promote dialogue related to democracy without providing equal time for students to espouse bigotry.

Other Related Matters The Supreme Court has held that anti-discrimination laws “do not, as a general matter, violate the First . . . Amendment” (Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, 1995, p. 572).

Kavey (2003) argues that these types of anti-discrimination policies regulate conduct and do not directly refer to any viewpoint. Extending this logic, when school officials, for example, ask a student to refrain from racist, homophobic, or anti-religious speech, they are not asking that student to change her religious viewpoint. Instead, school officials’

62 Eckes actions are addressing the student’s conduct within a venue that seeks to promote a discrimination-free environment. This approach aligns with the holding in Harper v.

Poway (2006a) when the Ninth Circuit ruled that injurious speech could be limited even when it reflected the speaker’s religious views about sexual orientation. Indeed, the court found no evidence that school officials tried to change the student’s religious views; rather, school officials sought to address the student’s conduct.

To be certain, many of the cases discussed above involve the tension between a student’s constitutional right to freely exercise his or her religion and other students’ constitutional rights to be let alone. Yet, it is not without precedent that the Supreme Court—sometimes within different contexts—has prohibited someone from relying on a sincerely held religious belief when discriminating against others. For example, Bob Jones University excluded African American students from enrolling because of university officials’ belief that the Bible forbids interracial dating and marriage. In the 1970s, the university began to allow African American students to enroll but maintained strict policies against interracial dating. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed whether Bob Jones, as a private university (and a K–12 private school) that practiced racially discriminatory policies based on religious beliefs could still qualify as a taxexempt organization (Bob Jones Univ. v. U.S., 1982). The Court ruled that private schools needed to comply with law and public policy prohibiting racial discrimination and that tax exemption was a privilege. Finding a compelling governmental interest in eradicating racial discrimination, the majority reasoned that its ruling did not violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Although in a different context, this case demonstrated how public policy (i.e., eradicating racial discrimination in a school setting) trumped sincerely held religious beliefs.

In more contemporary cases involving K–12 public schools, students have argued that anti-discrimination policies that prohibit speech related to race, religion, or sexual orientation offend their religious beliefs (see e.g., Hardwick v. Heyward, 2013; Nixon v.

N. Local Sch. Dist. Bd. of Educ., 2005; Zamecnik v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist., 2007).

While in the 1950s some students may have asserted their right to wear pro-segregation shirts to school based on political or religious beliefs, some students today assert their right to wear Confederate flags or anti-gay or anti-Muslim shirts. Thus, when school officials ban racially hostile, anti-religious, or anti-gay speech, they are sometimes accused of silencing another viewpoint in violation of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause and/or the Free Exercise Clause. Students also argue that they have the right to oppose viewpoints related to race or sexual orientation on religious or moral grounds. For example, as discussed above, Bob Jones University, a private, tax-exempt organization, relied on Biblical arguments when banning the enrollment of African American students (see e.g., Bob Jones Univ. v. U.S., 1983). Government policies that substantially burden a religious belief must be justified by a compelling state interest (Korte v. Sebelius, 2013). Bob Jones suggests that religious beliefs can be suppressed when it is contrary to national public policy. One federal court also stressed the difference between suppressing religious speech “solely because it is religious” and curtailing speech that is “religious and disruptive or hurtful” (Muller by Muller v.

Jefferson Lighthouse Sch., 1996, p. 1538). This is likely why some courts have upheld bans on Confederate flags despite the fact that doing so may constitute viewpoint

Homophobic Expression 63 discrimination (see Scott v. Sch. Bd of Alachua Cnty., 2003; West v. Derby Unified Sch. Dist. No. 260, 2000). However, not all courts have taken this approach (see Nuxoll v.

Indian Prairie Sch. Dist., 2008).

This article contends that school officials have a compelling interest in eradicating speech in public schools that denigrates another student. Deciding which messages can be curtailed is a highly complex issue for both courts and school personnel. The court decisions discussed in this case review provide a necessary context for understanding the legal parameters of school officials’ ability to prohibit speech that disparages others in K–12 public schools.

Method Court opinions influence education policy (Chemerinsky, 2003; Superfine, 2009), and the “law is a powerful tool that educators can use to advance their most important aims” (Heubert, 1997, pp. 574–575). In this case analysis of anti-LGBTQ speech, I used legal research methods (see First, Vines, Elue, & Pindar, 2015; McCarthy, 2010; Russo, 2006; Schimmel, 1996) to examine two federal circuit courts’ decisions related to antiLGBTQ speech. I selected these two federal circuit courts, the Seventh Circuit and the Ninth Circuit, because they are the only two circuit courts that have addressed the complex issue of balancing LGBTQ students’ rights to be free from harassment and other students’ rights to express their views about homosexuality. Although federal district courts in Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Tennessee, and Ohio have examined related issues (see Chambers v. Babbitt, 2001; Gillman ex rel. Gillman v. Sch. Bd., 2008; Hansen v. Ann Arbor Public Schs., 2003; Nixon v. N. Local Sch. Dist. Bd. of Educ., 2005; Young v. Giles Cnty. Bd. of Educ., 2015), I excluded these decisions from this dataset because the issue of anti-LGBTQ speech was never argued at the circuit court level; therefore, these cases have limited precedential value. I excluded other federal circuit decisions involving anti-LGBTQ speech if the merits of the case were never fully addressed in court (see Morrison v. Bd. of Educ., 2006, 2008) or if the main focus was on the overbreadth of an anti-discrimination policy (see e.g., Saxe v. State College Area Sch. Dist., 2001; Sypniewski v. Warren Hills Reg’l Bd. of Educ., 2002).

Legal research methods are similar to historical research in that they often involve identifying trends in the law through the examination of past actions or, in this case, decisions. As noted by education law scholars Beckham, Leas, Melear, and Mooney (2005), these methods combine elements of legal reasoning with an evolutionary perspective on the genesis and development of particular judicial issues relevant to education. Beckham and his colleagues contend that our understanding of the law is perpetually transformed through the adjudication of new cases. Russo (2006) similarly notes that legal research methodology is “a form of historical-legal research that is neither qualitative nor quantitative . . . it is a systemic investigation involving the interpretation and explanation of the law” (p. 6).

Employing legal research methods, I used a major legal database, LexisNexis, to retrieve multiple primary data sources. The primary sources of data analyzed for this inquiry include the following:

64 Eckes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Four federal district court opinions from Illinois (Zamecnik) A federal district court opinion from California (Harper) Two Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decisions (Nuxoll, Zamecnik)5 A Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision (Harper) Eight briefs, pleadings, and motions filed in a Seventh Circuit case Eleven briefs, pleadings, and motions filed in a Ninth Circuit case

Although the focus of this article are the two federal circuit court cases, it was also necessary to examine the procedural history of each of the two cases. Thus, I also examined several documents directly related to the two circuit court cases. In addition, I used LexisNexis to search for secondary sources, including legal treatises and restatements of the law that address at least one of the two cases at issue in this study.

However, only the student’s First Amendment claims in these cases were examined.

The eight court opinions (five district court and three circuit court) in the dataset were briefed and coded for the legal claims made, the precedent relied upon in the rulings, and the outcome. The briefs, pleadings, and motions filed with the two federal courts (n = 20), the treatises (n = 3), and restatements of the law (n = 2) were also coded to identify the major legal theories relied upon by all parties in the litigation. I followed Russo’s (2006) suggestions about how to dissect or analyze a legal opinion and employed a coding method that analyzes the claim, outcome, and relied-upon precedent. Using an Excel spreadsheet, I identified the legal claims under the First Amendment (i.e., freedom of speech and/or free exercise), listed the Plaintiff’s and the Defendant’s arguments, and included the case outcomes. In addition to coding whether the Plaintiff won or lost, I coded the relied-upon legal precedent (e.g., Tinker, Fraser, Hazelwood, Morse, or other federal circuit court opinions). Analyzing the documents (see Yin, 2014), court decisions, complaints, briefs, treatises, and restatements revealed encounters that allowed investigation of the interactions and discussions within and among the various case outcomes (Schank & Abelson, 1977). Overall, I analyzed over 1,800 pages of legal sources regarding LGBTQ speech.

Analysis of Case Findings The case history and legal outcomes from the Seventh and Ninth Circuits revealed how two federal circuit courts examined homophobic speech in K–12 public schools, thus answering the first research question regarding the court’s view of anti-LGBTQ speech. In Harper v. Poway (2004, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b), which involved a student wearing a “Homosexuality is Shameful” T-shirt, the Ninth Circuit ultimately prohibited the student’s speech by applying Tinker’s second prong, as the shirt impinged on the rights of other students or interfered with their right to be let alone. In Nuxoll v.

Indian Prairie Sch. Dist. #204 (2008) and Zamecnik v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist. (2007, 2009, 2010, 2011), the Seventh Circuit ruled in favor of a student who wanted to wear a “Be Happy, Not Gay” T-shirt in opposition to a LGBTQ rights event, applying the first prong of Tinker and finding that the shirt did not cause a disruption. The two rulings,

5

Nuxoll and Zamecnik are part of the same ongoing litigation within the Seventh Circuit.

Homophobic Expression 65 each discussed in greater detail below, thus create a conflict between two circuit courts, despite the fact that the cases have relatively similar legal issues involved.

Ninth Circuit Case: Anti-LGBTQ Speech Prohibited In Harper v. Poway (2006a), the Ninth Circuit examined an issue involving a T-shirt worn by a student to protest the National Day of Silence. During a “Straight Pride” counter-protest, the student, Harper, wore a T-shirt that said, citing a Bible passage, “I will not accept what God has condemned” and “Homosexuality is shameful” (Harper v.

Poway, 2004, p. 1100). School officials argued that the shirt was inflammatory and created a hostile environment for others. Although there was much disruption at the school, and students were suspended, Harper was not disciplined for his shirt. However, he filed a motion for a preliminary injunction6 against the administration so that he might be permitted to wear the shirt that school officials found inflammatory. He argued that the school’s actions amounted to viewpoint discrimination under Rosenberger. The federal district court denied Harper’s motion for a preliminary injunction because he failed to demonstrate that there was a likelihood of success on the merits of his First Amendment free-speech claim. Specifically, under Tinker’s first prong, the district court found evidence in the record to demonstrate that school personnel could reasonably forecast a substantial disruption or a material interference with school activities.

In affirming the district court’s decision to deny the motion for a preliminary injunction, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals did not apply Tinker’s substantial disruption standard, or first prong, but instead used Tinker’s second prong, which refers to the “rights of other students . . . to be secure and to be let alone” (p. 1177, citing Tinker p. 508). The court found that the shirt impinged upon the rights of other students. In permitting the school district to prohibit the shirt, the Ninth Circuit observed that his T-shirt “collides with the rights of other students” in the most fundamental way. Public school students who may be injured by verbal assaults on the basis of a core identifying characteristic, such as race, religion, or sexual orientation, have a right to be free from such attacks while on school campuses. As Tinker clearly states, students have the right to “be secure and to be let alone.” Being secure involves not only freedom from physical assaults but from psychological attacks that cause young people to question their self-worth and their rightful place in society. (p. 1178) The court relied on social science research in reaching this conclusion. Much of this research speaks to the harassment gay students experience in schools as a result of their sexual orientation. With regard to viewpoint discrimination, the court relied on earlier cases where the issue at hand was race, highlighting that “[w]hile the Confederate flag may express a particular viewpoint, [i]t is not only constitutionally allowable for school officials to limit the expression of racially explosive views, it is their duty to do so” (pp.

1184–1185).

6

A preliminary injunction stops a party from moving ahead with a policy, or it can compel a party to continue with a course of conduct until the case has been decided.

66 Eckes The dissenting judge in Harper, Judge Kozinski, believed that the majority misapplied Tinker and emphasized the importance of free debate on important social issues. He argued that tolerance for, or denunciation of, homosexuality is political, and that when the school district asked Harper to remove his shirt, it was promoting one political or religious viewpoint over another. The majority responded to the dissent and argued that although debate on social and political issues is often justified, such discussion does not “justify students in high schools or elementary schools assaulting their fellow students with demeaning statements: by calling gay students shameful, by labeling Black students inferior, or by wearing T-shirts saying that Jews are doomed to Hell” (p. 1181).

The Ninth Circuit denied a request for an en banc7 hearing. Concurring with the denial of the en banc request, one judge criticized the dissent in Harper: The dissenters still don’t get the message—or Tinker! Advising a young high school or grade school student while he is in class that he and other gays and lesbians are shameful, and that God disapproves of him, is not simply “unpleasant and offensive.” It strikes at the very core of the young student’s dignity and self-worth. Similarly, the example Judge Kozinski offers, a T-shirt bearing the message, “Hitler Had the Right Idea” on one side and “Let’s Finish the Job!” on the other, serves to intimidate and injure young Jewish students in the same way, as would T-shirts worn by groups of white students bearing the message “Hide Your Sisters—The Blacks Are Coming.” Under the dissent’s view, large numbers of majority students could wear such shirts to class on a daily basis, at least until the time minority members chose to fight back physically and disrupt the school’s normal educational process.

Perhaps some of us are unaware of, or have forgotten, what it is like to be young, belong to a small minority group, and be subjected to verbal assaults and opprobrium while trying to get an education in a public school, or perhaps some are simply insensitive to the injury that public scorn and ridicule can cause young minority students. Or maybe some simply find it difficult to comprehend the extent of the injury attacks such as Harper’s cause gay students. Whatever the reason for the dissenters’ blindness, it is surely not beyond the authority of local school boards to attempt to protect young minority students against verbal persecution, and the exercise of that authority by school boards is surely consistent with Tinker’s protection of the right of individual students “to be secure and to be let alone.” (2006b, p. 1053) The Supreme Court granted the petition for writ of certiorari.8 The Court vacated the judgment and remanded to the Ninth Circuit to dismiss the appeal as moot, noting that the district court had already entered final judgment and Harper, by that time, had already

7

An en banc session is one in which all members of a court rehear a case. Thus, in this case, every appellate judge on the court was asked to rehear the case.

8 A writ of certiorari is issued when a higher court orders a lower court that it will judicially review the lower court’s judgment.

Homophobic Expression 67 graduated and was therefore no longer a student (Harper v. Poway Unified Sch. Dist., 2007b). As a result, the final decision has limited precedential value, although the court’s rationale was later considered by the Seventh Circuit (see Zamecnik v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist., 2011).

Seventh Circuit Case: Anti-LGBTQ Speech Permitted In Nuxoll v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist. #204 (2008) and Zamecnik v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist. (2007, 2009, 2010, 2011),9 two high school students in Illinois alleged that their constitutional rights under the First Amendment were violated when school officials disciplined the older of the two students for wearing a T-shirt that said “Be Happy, Not Gay” on the day after the National Day of Silence and for censuring the students’ speech related to homosexuality. The purpose of the Day of Silence is to serve as a day of action to protest the bullying of LGBTQ students. School officials asked the student wearing the shirt to cross out the words “not gay” because they believed these words could create disruption. In a request for a preliminary injunction against the school district, the plaintiffs argued that school officials violated their First Amendment rights when school policy prohibited them from making “derogatory comments” that referred to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability. The students argued that the First Amendment permitted them to make negative comments about any of the groups listed in the policy as long as they did not use inflammatory language or “fighting words.”

A federal district court in Illinois denied the student’s request for the injunction, finding that this expression was contrary to the school’s legitimate educational mission under Hazelwood (see Zamecnik v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist., 2007). Moreover, the court determined that the policy’s purpose was to maintain a civilized educational environment and that the school had enforced the policy in an evenhanded manner. The court stressed that the students had not demonstrated a reasonable probability that their free speech rights had been violated.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) subsequently reversed the district court’s decision. Applying Tinker’s first prong, the court found no evidence of disruption. The court held that Tinker was the correct standard because the language on the T-shirt did not equate to fighting words. The court also reasoned that by allowing the shirt, the school would be viewpoint neutral on the National Day of Silence.

Judge Posner wrote that although it is true that “[p]eople are easily upset by comments about their race, sex, etc., including their sexual orientation . . . because for most people these are major components of their personal identity—none more so than a sexual orientation that deviates from the norm” (p. 671) and such “comments can strike a person at the core of his being” (p. 671), at the same time, “sexuality is not one of the nation’s pressing problems, [n]or a problem that can be solved by aggressive federal judicial intervention” (p. 672). This reasoning was made despite the judge noting that when adolescents hear derogatory comments about their sexuality, it can have a negative

9

As noted, Nuxoll and Zamecnik are part of the same ongoing litigation within the Seventh Circuit.

68 Eckes impact on their academic performance. Judge Posner then reasoned that a “far more urgent problem, the high dropout rates in many public schools” (p. 672), deserves more attention. He stressed that he believed the slogan “Be Happy, Not Gay” was only “tepidly negative” (p. 676). Moreover, the Seventh Circuit found that there was no indication that the derogatory comments were directed at a particular individual. The court also observed that, although there had been incidents of harassment involving gay students, there was not enough evidence indicating that this specific speech would cause a substantial disruption. The Seventh Circuit therefore remanded the case to the lower court with instructions for it to grant the preliminary injunction requested by the students.

In a concurring opinion, Judge Rovner agreed with the outcome of the case, but for somewhat different reasons. In particular, she did not find this to be a case about viewpoint discrimination. She posited that Tinker did not focus on whether the school allowed expression of opinion that was favorable to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. She also disagreed with the other judges’ assessment that the slogan “Be Happy, Not Gay” was “tepid.” Judge Rovner pointed out that the plaintiff’s brief stated that he intended this slogan to convey the message that “homosexual behavior is contrary to the teachings of the Bible, damaging to the participants and society at large, and does not lead to happiness” (pp. 678–679). As such, the judge believed that although this statement was specifically intended to derogate LGBTQ students who would find the slogan offensive, her overriding concern was permitting students to debate these controversial topics until it became a disruption.

When the lower court issued a permanent injunction allowing the students to continue wearing clothing with the slogan, a summary judgment10 in favor of the students, and an award of $25 in damages to each student, the school appealed. In this case, the Seventh Circuit upheld the district court’s decision to grant a summary judgment in favor of the students. The court did not find the language on the shirt to be fighting words and noted that 18-year-old students should not be raised in intellectual bubbles (Zamecnik v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist., 2011). The court also found that the First Amendment does not establish a “hurt feelings” defense. However, the Seventh Circuit did explain in Zamecnik that “[s]chool authorities are entitled to exercise discretion in determining when student speech crosses the line between hurt feelings and substantial disruption of the educational mission” (pp. 877–878).

These two circuit courts—the Ninth and the Seventh—are the only two federal circuit courts that have addressed anti-LGBTQ speech in K–12 public schools to this extent, and given their inconsistent conclusions, the legal parameters around homophobic speech are still in a state of flux. Nevertheless, these contradictory decisions outline the legal and policy issues involved for school personnel. Below, I discuss the current status of the law in order to inform school officials who might be interested in adopting policies that prohibit anti-LGBTQ speech in public schools.

With regard to homophobic speech, although the Seventh Circuit in Nuxoll/Zamecnik requires students to wait until such speech creates a substantial disruption, the Ninth Circuit in Harper appears willing to allow school officials to curtail anti-LGBTQ speech

10

A summary judgment occurs when a court enters a judgment for one party against another party without a full trial on the merits.

Homophobic Expression 69 because it interferes with the rights of others to be let alone under Tinker’s second prong.

Zamecnik and Harper demonstrate a potential split among the federal circuit courts that could lead to confusion in other parts of the country. Although those public schools within the jurisdiction of the Seventh Circuit will likely allow homophobic speech unless it creates a substantial disruption, the school districts under the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit have received a message from the circuit court that such speech can be curtailed.11 In addition to the two circuit court decisions discussed here that explicitly address homophobic speech, school leaders might also look to other circuits that have addressed racially hostile speech or anti-religious speech for guidance. As discussed, the Eleventh Circuit (see Denno, 2000; Scott, 2003) and the Sixth Circuit (see Boroff, 2000) would appear to allow school officials to regulate speech that denigrates, even without any disruption present under Fraser. In addition to the Ninth Circuit, the Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth Circuits recognized Tinker’s second prong in cases involving racially hostile speech. Because the current status of the law is undecided within some jurisdictions, school officials in these states—where there are no decisions involving racist, homophobic, or anti-religious speech—may struggle more when adopting policies that prohibit anti-LGBTQ speech in K–12 public schools.

Discussion Despite the limited number of rulings and lack of explicit legal guidance from the courts on homophobic speech in K–12 public schools, the lower court opinions on racially hostile and anti-religious speech, and the U.S. Supreme Court cases involving student expression, may provide some guidance for school officials. This section extrapolates from existing case law and suggests three ways in which speech that denigrates others might be analyzed. Any of these analytic approaches would lead to better education policy in K–12 public schools and provide much-needed clarity to school leaders.12 First, homophobic speech is not political speech and thus should not be protected in this context. Instead, Tinker’s second prong is the more appropriate standard to use when speech denigrates a student in a public school context. There is legal precedent in some circuits for taking this approach and doing so would undoubtedly give school leaders more leeway in prohibiting injurious speech that disparages students in public schools.

Second, arguably, Fraser (i.e., speech is curtailed if it exceeds the boundaries of socially appropriate behavior), Morse (i.e., speech is restricted to promote safety), and Hazelwood (i.e., speech is limited if contrary to the school’s legitimate mission) already permit school leaders and courts to prohibit speech that denigrates without violating the First Amendment. If the existing precedent does not allow prohibiting speech that denigrates, courts should create a new standard to address this issue.

11 12

Of course, school leaders would need to consult with their attorneys for district-specific guidance.

Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice.

70 Eckes Tinker’s Second Prong Should Apply As the analysis of case findings suggest, and as other education law scholars have observed (Fetter-Harrott, 2014; Macias, 2008, 2012; McCarthy, 2009b), many courts apply Tinker’s first prong (substantial disruption) and often overlook the second prong (speech that impinges on the rights of others). As noted, however, the Fourth, Sixth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuit rulings suggest that the second prong could be an option.

Indeed, ignoring the second prong is problematic because the question confronted in the Tinker decision is different from speech that attacks or denigrates another student (see McCarthy, 2009b). Specifically, Tinker did not focus on speech that intruded upon the rights of other students but instead centered on private, passive political speech (i.e., students wearing armbands to protest war). Wearing an armband criticizing a war is quite different from wearing a shirt that vilifies another student in a public school setting (see Houle, 2008).

Moreover, just as debating another student’s race or religion is not a political issue, neither is another student’s sexual orientation. Although some might still debate interracial marriage or same-sex marriage as a political issue, speech that specifically attacks and disparages a student’s core being (e.g., Black people are criminals, Muslims are terrorists, gays are sinful) is not political speech but a socially hurtful, demoralizing, and psychologically damaging act that goes against the educational mission of public schooling. Such speech certainly does not contribute to the “marketplace of ideas” discussed in Tinker (p. 512, citing Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 1967, p. 603). Speech that denigrates or impinges on the rights of others should not be permitted in school under Tinker’s second prong.

Along these same lines, there is an important distinction between identity speech and political expression (Calhoun, 1995; Hunter, 1993). Specifically, harassment based on gay self-worth is not “political speech in which public school students have any right to engage” (Macias, 2012, p. 794) and, further, it damages the dignity and educational success of a vulnerable population (Waldron, 2012). Macias (2012) suggests that when people disagree about one’s sexual orientation, it is as problematic as disagreeing about one’s race. When we allow political debate about whether or not sexual orientation (or race or religion) is acceptable in schools, it is really a debate about a student’s worth (Macias, 2012), a conversation that is translated for the student into an appraisal of their self-worth. Gilreath (2009, 2011) similarly posits that these anti-gay T-shirts are a type of “anti-identity” (2009, p. 558; 2011, p. 112) that denies the victim existential status. The concurring judge in Harper correctly observed that such speech “strikes at the very core of the young student’s dignity and self-worth” (p. 1053), a level of denigration that must not be permitted in the public-school setting.

Further, by employing the substantial disruption analysis within the public K–12 school context, courts are suggesting that school officials need to allow bullying to escalate before they can intervene. This form of self-advocacy by the victims is clearly problematic within public schools, where students should feel safe and welcome (see Biegel, 2010). Moreover, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Kann et al., 2016) found that there are 1.3 million high school students who identify as LGBTQ (8% of the high school population), and research suggests that gay teens are 8.4 times more likely to have attempted suicide (Parents and Friends of Lesbian and Gays NYC,

Homophobic Expression 71 n.d.). Within this group, more than 40% said they have considered committing suicide in the last year and 30% have actually attempted suicide. In comparison, the CDC reported that 15% of straight students have considered suicide and 6% have actually attempted the act. These sobering statistics imply that anti-LGBTQ bullying, in schools and perhaps elsewhere, is disruptive to gay students’ well-being and that anti-gay bullying creates a substantial disruption for the student whose identity is being denigrated.

When Judge Posner in Nuxoll (2008) observed that sexuality is not one of the nation’s most “pressing problems” (p. 672), he must not have been aware of the high rates of suicide, and other types of self-harm, by LGBTQ students who are bullied and harassed in our nation’s public schools (Biegel & Kuehl, 2010; Hatzenbuehler, Birkett, Van Wagenen, & Meyer, 2014; Huebner et al., 2004; Levasseur et al., 2013).

Furthermore, the effect of speech that denigrates others has been shown to increase dropout rates, an issue Judge Posner did identify as critically important. To be certain, a hostile learning environment impacts a student’s ability to perform well academically, and learning is disrupted when anti-gay bullying is not addressed.

Under these circumstances, substantial disruption should be understood as doing harm to the individual student (see Kowalski v. Berkley Cnty. Schs., 2011). Further, a small minority population of LGBTQ students, a group that often hides in the closet for fear of bullying and harassment, should not be saddled with the onus of creating a substantial disruption of speaking out against denigrating speech. To be certain, speech that denigrates others, whether related to sexual orientation, race, or religion, has the potential to create psychological harm, which should be considered a disruption, even if only a few students experience the injurious speech. Thus, even if courts insist on using Tinker’s first prong, it could certainly be argued that a substantial disruption is created when students miss school because they are fearful, feel unwelcomed, or attempt suicide or commit other self-harm as a result of speech that denigrates them or attacks their core being. Although Tinker’s second prong clearly applies in this context, arguably, Tinker’s first prong might also apply because this type of speech creates a learning environment that is hostile and disruptive to a student’s academic growth and personal well-being.

To avoid this potential for quantifying a student’s right to protection from denigrating speech, Tinker’s second prong should be the applicable test. The Supreme Court has failed to elaborate on this prong, yet Tinker’s second prong seems most applicable to cases that involve speech that denigrates another student, whereas the first prong might be more appropriate in scenarios where the speech is directed toward parties or issues that do not directly affect or attack another student (e.g., political speech). Although the precise scope of Tinker’s second prong is unclear, as discussed, a few circuit courts have relied upon it or at least recognized it as a viable argument (see Barr v. Lafon, 2008; Harper v. Poway, 2006a; Kowalski v. Berkley Cnty. Schs., 2011; West v. Derby Unified Sch. Dist. No. 260, 2000). Consistent with this recognition in the Fourth, Sixth, Ninth, and Tenth circuits, homophobic speech that denigrates could arguably be prohibited under Tinker’s second prong.

72 Eckes Fraser, Hazelwood, and Morse Might Also Prohibit Speech that Denigrates Others Under other Supreme Court expression cases (Fraser, Hazelwood, and Morse), speech that denigrates another student could be limited using existing precedent as well.

Indeed, Fraser, Hazelwood, and Morse suggest that a Tinker substantial-disruption approach is not always required. By prohibiting hateful speech that denigrates others, it is “teaching students the boundaries of socially appropriate behavior” (Fraser, 1986, p.

681). As suggested by the Eleventh Circuit (Denno, 2000; Scott, 2003), in cases addressing Confederate flags, at a minimum, we need a flexible Fraser standard for speech that entreats upon the responsibility of the school to inculcate in students manners and habits of civility. For example, Fraser states we “must also take into account consideration of the sensibilities of others, and in the case of a school, the sensibilities of fellow students” (p. 681). Indeed, wearing a Confederate flag or a T-shirt that states “Homosexuality is shameful” or “Jesus is a Lie” can be as equally damaging to other students as Fraser’s speech was in the school gymnasium. When the Court upheld the school officials’ decision to suspend Fraser, it sent a clear message that school personnel may promote a lesson of civil conduct. This type of student expression is also contrary to the school’s legitimate educational mission under Hazelwood, where the Court found that there are special characteristics in the school environment that may require censorship.

Furthermore, the Morse Court did not review the school’s history about whether there were past disruptive events that related to drug advocacy. Instead, the Court gave school leaders the discretion to address speech associated with drug use, as it is clearly an important safety issue. Perhaps the Court should also give school leaders the discretion to address speech that denigrates others (i.e., another important safety issue when considering bullying and suicide rates). In other words, just as the Supreme Court recognized an “important, perhaps compelling” interest in deterring drug use in schools, the Court might also find it just as important to limit speech that denigrates others to deter bullying, self-harm, or suicide (Morse, 2007, p. 407). As discussed, the Sixth Circuit cited Morse when it restricted contemptuous and racially hostile speech in schools (e.g., Defoe, 2010).

Although courts should already be able to rely on existing precedent to curtail speech that denigrates students in public schools, there is also another option. Specifically, if the Supreme Court can carve out an exception in Morse for illegal drugs and in Fraser for highly offensive speech, why not a very narrow exception for speech that denigrates others? In other words, if we can ban the “Bong Hits” message in Morse or a student council speech that included a sexual metaphor in Fraser, schools should certainly be able to exclude speech that harms students. As noted earlier, speech that denigrates is speech that attacks members of a minority group who have been historically marginalized. This type of expression makes students feel inferior, intimidates them, and attacks their core being. In turn, it creates an impediment to learning. Waldron (2012) contends that such harms are not only individual, but also social harms that create a poisoned environment in schools.

Of course, any further limitations on student speech should be very narrowly drawn to only include speech that denigrates other students. The new standard regarding speech that denigrates should ask the following: (a) Does the injurious speech attack a minority member’s core being? and (b) Is the speech wholly inconsistent with the public school’s

Homophobic Expression 73 mission? Critics will argue over the definition of what type of speech would fall under this new legal standard. Although it is a valid concern, courts frequently grapple with these types of definitions. For example, the substantial disruption standard in Tinker is no model of clarity. To be certain, it is not entirely clear when student speech constitutes a “substantial disruption” or what type of speech should be considered “lewd and vulgar.”

This lack of clarity explains why courts struggle with and often issue conflicting opinions when examining student-speech cases. As noted earlier, circuit courts have taken different approaches to Tinker’s substantial-disruption standard when examining student speech involving Confederate flags. These definitions have been and will continue to be addressed in courtrooms for many years to come. This potential difficulty does not mean, however, that courts should not try to issue rulings that would create guidance to school personnel on anti-LGBTQ speech.

Of course, some will also contend that this type of line-drawing with regard to speech that denigrates another could lead to a slippery slope. For example, one might ask whether we should also extend these types of protections to students who are teased in public schools because they are overweight. Although such speech certainly could be considered inappropriate and hurtful, it does not fall under the definition of speech that denigrates, as described above. Such questions are fair but not difficult because these other types of commentary (e.g., speech related to a student’s weight), can already be limited under many states’ anti-bullying laws and likely do not involve the issues related to viewpoint discrimination and religion under the First Amendment.

Addressing Viewpoint Discrimination The issue of viewpoint discrimination is a hurdle but, as several circuit courts suggest, the question of viewpoint should not be so stringently applied in the K–12 public school setting. In Harper, the Ninth Circuit reasoned that “[w]hile the Confederate flag may express a particular viewpoint, [i]t is not only constitutionally allowable for school officials to limit the expression of racially explosive views, it is their duty to do so” (pp.

1184–1185). Moreover, the Harper court reasoned that schools can promote dialogue related to democracy “without being required to provide equal time for student or other speech espousing intolerance, bigotry, or hatred” (p. 1185). The court explained that because a school sponsors a “Day of Religious Tolerance,” it need not permit its students to wear T-shirts reading, “Jews Are Christ-Killers” or “All Muslims Are Evil Doers.” Such expressions would be “wholly inconsistent with the ‘fundamental values’ of public school education.” Similarly, a school that permits a “Day of Racial Tolerance” may restrict a student from displaying a swastika or a Confederate flag. (pp. 1185–1186) The dissent in Harper reasoned, though, that there is a political disagreement about LGBTQ issues in this country. However, as the majority suggested, there has also been political disagreement about racial equality. Although there may be debates related to race, religion, or sexual orientation, or issues such as same-sex marriage that pertain to a particular minority group and have political value, the “political” issue can be discussed in schools in a way that does not cross the line to denigrate students. Where to draw the

74 Eckes line will be a difficult determination, but courts and school officials have been required to struggle with other subjective standards in the past (e.g., what constitutes a substantial disruption). If administrators go too far in limiting protected speech, students can resort to the courts as they have for several decades.

It is indeed possible for students to have a forum in public schools to exchange conflicting ideas about race, sexual orientation, religion, climate change, politics, or any number of thorny topics without denigrating another student. As the Supreme Court stressed We must take this risk; and our history says that it is this sort of hazardous freedom . . . that is the basis of our national strength and the independence and vigor of Americans who grow up and live in this relatively permissive, often disputatious, society. (Tinker, 1969, p. 508) However, these discussions should allow for the exchange of diverse viewpoints and should be encouraged without disparaging students from a historically marginalized group. In making this distinction, student political speech and speech related to social issues should remain protected under Tinker’s first prong.

Similar to limitations that have already been placed on student speech through the four U.S. Supreme Court student speech cases discussed, viewpoint discrimination should not permit students free reign to engage in all forms of speech. To be certain, context matters, and allowing students to engage in speech that demeans another student—whether on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the National Day of Silence, or a religious tolerance day—should not be permitted. As noted in Harper (2006a), “a school has the right to teach civic responsibility and tolerance as part of its basic educational mission; it need not as a quid pro quo permit hateful and injurious speech that runs counter to that mission” (pp. 1185–1186). At least three other circuits have taken similar approaches to viewpoint discrimination within the K–12 context (B.W.A. v. Farmington R-7 Sch. Dist., 2009; Hardwick v. Heyward, 2013; Morgan v. Swanson, 2011).

With regard to protecting religious expression, school districts can provide a compelling reason to regulate such speech under these circumstances. The compelling reason is that students have a right to be let alone in school and not to be denigrated by other students who do not share their religious beliefs. Similar to the Court’s past conclusions, despite religious interests, discrimination in schools is contrary to national public policy (Bob Jones, 1982), and malicious speech can be curtailed in public spaces (Beauharnais, 1952). Also, as stated in Muller (1996), religious speech should not be suppressed solely because it is religious, but because it is religious and hurtful. Finally, courts might ensure that one’s individual religious liberty is protected, but, in doing so, should not regulate the liberty rights of others (Laycock, 2014).

Conclusion Students are often at the forefront of social change, and schools should equip them with the ability to think critically and to express thoughtfully their opinions on issues of political and social importance. Learning the value of open debate is absolutely an essential part of public schooling. Yet it is possible to engage in such debates without

Homophobic Expression 75 engaging in injurious assaults, verbal or otherwise, against students who are often marginalized in schools.

When student speech crosses the line and denigrates others, school officials should be able to rely on existing precedent to curtail such speech and expect that the courts will support these efforts. An important role of school leaders is to cultivate a culture of acceptance and a feeling of belonging for all students. Thus, to address disharmony at the schoolhouse gate, it is sometimes necessary to inculcate manners and civility. Students, asserting their First Amendment rights, could express their view that “all gays are sinners who are going to hell” or could call all Christians or Muslims “ignorant fools” in a public forum, where a minority student has the option of leaving. But these words should not be used with classmates in a public school setting, a place where students are required to be.

Unwanted denigrating speech is especially problematic because the students who are targeted are often powerless to avoid it.

As previously discussed, the second prong of Tinker (i.e., the right of a student to be let alone) is the most applicable when analyzing student speech that denigrates. However, even under Tinker’s first prong, speech that denigrates can arguably be curtailed because it disrupts the student’s personal well-being. Further, Fraser, Hazelwood, and Morse also grant schools the ability to limit speech that denigrates in order to teach civility or for safety purposes. Alternatively, the Supreme Court should create another exception to Tinker that ensures that all students will feel welcome, safe, and supported in public school. The new standard regarding speech that denigrates should ask the following: (a) Does the injurious speech attack another minority student’s core being? and (b) Is the speech wholly inconsistent with the public school’s mission? Such a framing of demeaning speech would allow school leaders to take a more ethical approach to this complex issue and would give them further guidance on this legal question.

Author Biography Suzanne E. Eckes, JD, PhD, is a professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at Indiana University (IU). Dr. Eckes has published over 150 education law-related articles (e.g., American Educational Research Journal, Review of Research in Education, Teachers College Record, Peabody Journal of Education, Educational Policy, Educational Administration Quarterly, Journal of School Leadership) and book chapters (e.g., Harvard Education Press, Teachers College Press). She has also co-authored or co-edited nine books. She is president-elect of the Education Law Association and a monthly legal columnist for Principal Leadership magazine. She earned her EdM from Harvard University and her JD and PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Prior to joining the faculty at IU, she was a public high school teacher and practicing attorney.

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Available online at http://Escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre

Call for Conversations Introduction Since its founding in 2010, the Berkeley Review of Education (BRE) has committed to supporting an open exchange of ideas regarding the relationship between public education and other pressing issues in society, such as those concerning race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and citizenship. However, publishing a peerreviewed scholarly journal takes time, and often contemporary political, social, and cultural events—and their impact on public education—warrant a more immediate response.

In 2014, the BRE Editorial Board felt compelled to step outside the structures of traditional academic publishing and provide a space for a wide array of voices—within and beyond academia—to engage in an open and dynamic dialogue. We issued our first Call for Conversations (CFC) to solicit written and multimedia pieces on the intersection between the Black Lives Matter movement and public education. Scholars, practitioners, activists, and students submitted thoughtful and meaningful pieces regarding how the Black Lives Matter movement shaped their work with young people in classrooms and community spaces. Submissions were published on our website and a selection of these were included in Volume 5, Number 2, of the BRE. Following the 2016 Presidential Election, we revived the CFC in order to provide an intellectual space for individuals to reflect upon and make sense of what the election of Donald Trump would mean for public education in the United States. Again, we were compelled to facilitate a dialogue among individuals from a range of perspectives in order to build community and democratize knowledge. At a time of deep political, cultural, economic, and racial division in our country, we invited the broader education community to exchange ideas and reflections about how we got to this moment and where we go from here. We asked: What does the election of Donald Trump tell us about society in general and education specifically? What can we do in our roles and with our skills to teach, learn, protest, resist, and understand education in the era of Trump?

We received nearly 60 submissions and published 33 pieces on our website between January and March 2017, beginning the day of Trump’s inauguration, January 20th.1 Scholars, practitioners, activists, and students shared critical and reflective essays, poems, sample curricula, and more related to topics such as how to talk to young children about the election, the impact of the election on immigrant and undocumented students, the power of youth activism, school integration as a form of resistance, the election’s implications for teacher preparation programs, and the role of scholarship in a so-called “post-truth” era. We are pleased to republish eight of these pieces here, representing just some of the responses evoked among the community of CFC authors.2 1

http://www.berkeleyreviewofeducation.com/cfc2016-blog Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the original 33 pieces published online, and the eight republished here, are solely those of the original authors. These views and opinions do not represent those of the BRE, its board, University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Education, University of California Berkeley, other organizations that sponsor the BRE, and/or any/all contributors to the BRE website or the BRE. Please also note that these pieces reflect the authors’ reactions at the original time of publication online, January through March 2017.

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Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 81–83

82 Call for Conversations In “Oklahoma is a Moving Train: On Trump and the (Impossible) Demand for “Neutral” Classrooms in a Red State,” Erin Dyke, Sarah Gordon, and Jennifer Job draw upon survey responses from educators and their own experiences as faculty members to reject the notion of political neutrality in the classroom. They describe how a deep history of racism and conservative politics in Oklahoma render any discussion of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other social issues highly controversial in Oklahoma’s public schools. Yet the authors argue that, by remaining silent on these issues, educators effectively reinforce the legacy of racism, discrimination, and violence long experienced among Oklahoma’s poor students and students of color.

In “Made You Look: Reflecting on the Trump Election and Patterns of False Response,” Adam Freas and Jesus Limon-Guzman focus on the current need to build communities and movements aimed at supporting and empowering marginalized students, particularly undocumented ones. Freas and Limon-Guzman are community college educators and hip-hop scholars, and they draw upon their personal and professional experiences to describe how the 2016 election has generated fear and uncertainty within their communities. At the same time, they argue that current political conditions provide critical opportunities for “radical advocacy paired with action” (p. 100). Written prior to Trump’s September 2017 repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the authors’ call for advocacy and action is arguably more pressing today than it was immediately following the election.

Cheryl Burleigh’s poem, “Can the DREAM Still Exist?,” similarly focuses on the election’s impact on immigrant and undocumented students. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act provides undocumented youth with a pathway toward permanent residency and citizenship in the United States. Based on conversations with students who depend on DREAM Act grants and programs, Burleigh’s poem depicts the hope these students feel despite anxiety and uncertainty regarding their futures.

In “Understanding and Undermining Fake News From the Classroom,” Adam Rosenzweig calls upon educators to help students navigate the plethora of fake news and unsubstantiated claims made across the Internet. In doing so, Rosenzweig argues, teachers foster students’ ability to be critical readers of online content. These critical thinking and reading skills are foundational to students’ political intelligence and will serve them well as engaged citizens in their communities. In this way, as Rosenzweig describes, teachers embrace a political classroom without necessarily engaging in partisan politics.

Leela Velautham similarly argues for the need to sharpen critical thinking skills among students and the broader public at a time when fake news and post-truth politics proliferate. In “Designing an Intervention to Promote Critical Thinking About Statistics in the General Public,” Velautham describes an intervention that she devised to help individuals differentiate between accurate and misleading statistics more effectively. She argues that interventions like these could help educators teach students the skills needed to distinguish fact from fiction and to recognize when journalists and elected officials misrepresent data for political purposes.

Sixteen-year-old Eleni Eftychiou wrote the poem “For Girls Made of Fire” two days after the election in an effort to express her “[refusal] to be silenced” by those who

Call for Conversations 83 supported Trump and fueled his ascent to the presidency. Her lyrical language and evocative imagery illustrate the physical and emotional violence experienced among women and girls. Through the refrain of “i burn,” Eftychiou gives voice to the fury that many women and girls felt after the election.

In “Contextualizing Trump: Education for Communism,” Curry Malott turns to history in order to understand the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Malott argues that the fall of communism paved the way for neoliberalism, leading to wealth redistribution, ensuing economic inequities, and the rise of right-wing political ideologies.

According to Malott, these economic and political conditions—more so than racism—led the white working class to overwhelmingly support Trump’s presidential campaign. Thus, Malott claims, resisting Trump requires educating U.S. Americans on the history and logic of communism.

Finally, casting his gaze beyond the United States, Michael Thier argues that global citizenship education can serve as a powerful tool for teaching students to empathize and engage with people and cultures different from their own. In “Curbing Ignorance and Apathy (Across the Political Spectrum) Through Global Citizenship Education,” Thier argues that the narrowly domestic curricular focus across U.S. schools constrains students’ abilities to regard those different from themselves with respect. He maintains that global citizenship education is a key step toward addressing the deep political, social, and cultural rifts afflicting American society today.

We include these eight pieces here to provide readers with a taste of the complete CFC collection. Together, the authors of the 33 pieces published on the BRE website reflect on and analyze public education in the era of Trump through an array of theoretical, empirical, professional, personal, and political perspectives, resulting in a dynamic exchange of ideas. We encourage our readers to visit our website for the full CFC collection, which we hope inspires continued conversation about the role of public education during these uncertain and contentious times.

Â

Available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre

Oklahoma is a Moving Train: On Trump and the (Impossible) Demand for “Neutral” Classrooms in a Red State Erin Dyke, Sarah Gordon,1 and Jennifer Job Oklahoma State University

The day directly following the election, I had 10% of my Hispanic population either in my office or in the counselor’s office crying, believing that they were going to be deported. This is not because they watch how our president-elect speaks of them; it’s because of how their fellow students are treating them.

––Oklahoma Elementary School Administrator and Graduate Student My third graders are on edge. . . . “I know my mom is lying so I feel better when she tells me it’ll be okay,” wrote one African-American boy in his written response to the election results. . . . There is a complete rift between the students whose families support Trump and those that supported Clinton. One Trumpsupporter child even said, “Well my family is all White, so we’ll be okay,” as his classmates voiced their fears about being separated from bi-racial parents. The tension in my classroom is that of the weather before a major summer thunderstorm rolls in: You feel the pressure, know the rain and thunder are coming; you feel prepared, yet you don’t know exactly what to do.

––Oklahoma Third-Grade Teacher and Graduate Student The reactions of the American people following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016 were similar to the campaign itself— divisive, conflicted, and acrimonious. Not surprisingly, these reactions have found their way into America’s classrooms, both in K–12 and higher-education institutions. A survey conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (2016) of more than 10,000 K–12 teachers, counselors, and administrators found that “the results of the election are having a profoundly negative impact on schools and students” (p. 6). In our red state, the impacts of the rise of the white-supremacist alt-right on education contexts have been intense and have come to the forefront of conversation in the field. Educators at all levels are faced with navigating difficult dialogues that further expose the divisions of race, ethnicity, religion, gender/sexuality, and class in this country.

In Oklahoma, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election was quite predictable. In the university, most of our white women students come from conservative towns and

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Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sarah Gordon, PhD, 245 Willard Hall, Whitehurst Lane, Stillwater, OK, 74074. Email: sarah.gordon@okstate.edu.

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86 Dyke, Gordon, & Job areas of Oklahoma and Texas2 that are majority white or urban/suburban areas that are deeply segregated along race and class lines. In a mock presidential election for the undergraduate elementary education majors in a class, the overwhelming majority voted for Trump. Our students of color, queer students, non-Christian students, and students with critical or radical politics often feel hyper-marginalized in their classrooms. Here, extreme austerity in education, and all other public social supports and services, has meant that universities rely heavily on private donor funds and student tuition, and teacher education program enrollment has been declining as the working conditions and wages for teachers have become nearly unlivable in Oklahoma (Eger, 2015). In education generally, and especially at our university where the norm is a gritty white conservatism, we are structurally disciplined to keep students happy and, for us untenured faculty, to remain “neutral” in our work and pedagogy. As critical scholars, our research claims education is, in fact, always already political.

We coauthors come from various locations—an Oklahoma native who studies higher education (Sarah); a queer-femme with abolitionist, feminist, and de-colonial commitments who has recently arrived in Oklahoma (Erin); and a Southern native who settled in Oklahoma four years ago and is concerned with the political context of education in the state (Jennifer). Our own roles as teacher educators, student advocates, and social movement workers—coupled with the struggles of our students and their students, minoritized along the lines of race, class, indigeneity, citizenship status, and gender/sexuality—provide motivation for engaging in critical conversations to make sense of education in the era of Trump. How do we engage pedagogically with our contemporary political moment deep in the heart of a red state?

We draw on our own experiences and responses from an anonymous departmentwide survey that collected experiences and perspectives from undergraduate education majors, teacher education faculty, and in-service teacher-graduate students on the impacts of the election on their classrooms. This essay considers what it means to pedagogically engage the political in our Oklahoma contexts. We begin by describing the state’s political context and historicizing the impossibility of neutrality in education. Building on this framing, we analyze 25 survey responses, some stridently pro-Trump and unabashedly white nationalist, and others that describe in detail the effects of the election on Oklahoma’s minoritized young people. We end with some thoughts on pedagogical strategies moving forward.

The Oklahoma Context Oklahoma’s formation as a U.S. state is constitutive with settler colonialism, genocide, forced migration of Black and Indigenous peoples from the Southeast, and white poverty disciplined through what Roediger (1999) has called the psychological wage of whiteness. As an example of its effects, in 1921 an economically successful Black neighborhood in Tulsa was violently razed, with more than 300 people murdered by white working-class men and police (Ellsworth, 1992). The legacies of these events 2

As an example of the conservative culture in small towns in Oklahoma, see the New York Times article by Fernandez (2016) describing the violent reaction of some residents in Enid, Oklahoma, when their local newspaper endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Trump and Oklahoma 87 are perpetually felt among Oklahoma’s minoritized communities—communities that are growing and shifting Oklahoma demographics. White Oklahomans’ education often ensures their knowledge of such histories is superficial at best.

The state’s broader culture is shaped by Republican-party values, such as deregulation, decreasing government size and scope, demonization of same-sex marriage and abortion, and tax breaks for the wealthiest. These have ensured ecological degradation via fracking and wastewater injection, and the upward redistribution of wealth (Cohen & Schneyer, 2016). Education budgets were already declining before Oklahoma’s oil industry took a recent steep downturn. Since 2015, education and social services have been hit even harder with cuts. In February 2016, higher-education budgets were cut by 16% in one fiscal year. K–12 districts were forced to lay off teachers and/or cut pay, and many districts changed to a four-day school week to save money (Perry, 2016). With no fix in sight, Oklahoma remains 46th in the nation for education (“Oklahoma earns,” 2016) and 47th in the nation for spending per pupil (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015), and leads the country on making the deepest cuts to school funding (OK Policy Institute, 2014).

Years of poor funding choices, massive budget cuts to education and social services, and punitive use of state test scores on Oklahoma’s teachers have made the classroom environment in Oklahoma tense and difficult at times. Coupled with a fiercely conservative majority of voters, state legislative attempts to pass deceptive and discriminatory laws (e.g., an attempt to legislate against teaching evolution in the classroom and the Oklahoma International and Sharia Law amendment; see Gershman, 2013), public demonstrations of racism (e.g., “greeting” President Obama by waving nearly a dozen Confederate flags across the street from his hotel when he visited the state; see Zezima, 2015), and a university fraternity caught on video singing a racist chant (see New, 2015), these issues demonstrate Oklahoma’s volatile racial and educational environment.

Political Discussion in the Classroom Curriculum scholars have long argued that neutrality lends itself toward stabilizing and sedimenting the status quo (Grumet, 1989; Levin, 2008; Thampi, 1975). In Oklahoma, pressures on educators to create learning environments that are "apolitical" and "neutral" serve to reinforce the racist, colonialist, and sexist logics that undergird so much of our state's governing practices. Thus, engaging in political/politicized discussions is a controversial and often risky practice for the largely un-unionized educators in Oklahoma.

Ziegler’s (1967) seminal research on the political lives of teachers highlighted the extent to which teachers feared sanction for discussing controversial subjects in the classroom. They cited administration, parents, and local groups as likely to influence repercussions if teachers broke the status quo in this manner. Levin (2008) confirmed that such groups are powerful in disciplining classroom topics. Teachers also cited an unwillingness to offend their students––partly due to their perceived nurturing roles and partly again for fear of sanction––as reason to not raise controversial topics in the classroom (Evans, Avery, & Pederson, 2000). There are also risks to individual students.

Initially, students may be unfamiliar with instruction about political issues and may be

88 Dyke, Gordon, & Job unwilling to participate; additionally, students come to class with firm prejudices and ways of thinking that may not be conducive to discussing these topics (Stradling, 1984).

Sillin (1995) names the continued use of the nuclear family as one example of the ways that attempts at non-bias reinforce the status quo: Curriculum generally sticks to a generic example of one father, one mother, and one or two children when speaking of the family, despite the fact that single-parent households are quite common—in fact, recent surveys have found that more children were born to single mothers under 30 than to married mothers (Martin, Hamilton, Osterman, Curtin, & Mathews, 2013). The most overt and widespread difficulty is the assumption that there is a set of “facts” for each controversial issue, or hard truths that are simply muddled by bias and extenuating cultural circumstances. Feminist theorists have long argued that the supposed objectivity and neutrality of such facts are products of the imposition and universalization of Western and patriarchal knowledge traditions (cf. Grumet, 1989).

The theoretical grounding for teaching political issues emphasizes not only that teachers are not neutral in these discussions, but that it is impossible to be (Hess, 2004).

Neighbour (1996) states that even the choice to avoid an issue in class is a political decision. When teachers do engage politics in the classroom, they are often expected to be moderators that allow for both sides of each issue. Such an approach can sway toward validating all viewpoints. When one side of an issue is white supremacy, teachers cannot possibly remain neutral and neither can their institutions.

The Survey: Teachers Have Politics and Classrooms Are Porous Our own experiences, coupled with reports from colleagues, students, and graduate students who teach full-time about a spate of post-election racist, xenophobic, and gendered incidents of bullying in schools, on campus, and in the community, led to the creation of a departmental initiative, Equity to Action. The initiative grew out of a desire among Erin and a few of our colleagues to collect these stories and perspectives and use them to form the basis of a statement, making clear that our department refuses to tolerate discrimination. To ensure maximum participation and sincerity, we offered complete anonymity. Although this was limiting in some ways, respondents’ anonymity illuminated the precariousness and superficiality of common educational and institutional discourses that appropriate the language of “multiculturalism,” “social justice,” and “diversity.” Analysis across the 25 responses revealed a strong dichotomy between (a) educators attempting to make sense of the intense effects of election discourses on themselves and their students in their school contexts (12 respondents), and (b) a deep frustration among many pro-Trump students and some faculty with the survey’s implication that classrooms are/should be political spaces at all (13 respondents; given the demographics of the department, we can assume the racial make-up as majority white and women).

Survey responses that demanded politics be left out of the classroom drew on two main thematic arguments: First, the demand grew out of a palpable fear of and/or anger at dissent. Respondents’ fear/anger manifested in language that masked and delegitimized the historical foundations and the racialized, gendered/sexualized, and classed nature of the rise of white nationalism in the US and globally. Second, arguments for classroom neutrality largely drew on an ideological framework that imagines the ideal “learning

Trump and Oklahoma 89 child” as ahistorical and politically pure (cf. Lesko, 1996; Meiners, 2015). Such responses cast any classroom discussion of electoral politics or politics more broadly as unprofessional or “inappropriate” (the latter a popular word among respondents).

The first rationale portrayed negative responses as a form of “whining:” As one put it, “People need to stop promoting the idea that all republicans are racist and/or sexist.

People also need to stop promoting the idea that everyone needs to be comforted and babied 24/7.” Similarly, another respondent likened “demanding special care” with acting childlike: I find peoples [sic] reactions to the outcome of this election to be appalling.

Pleading classes to be canceled or requesting counseling because someone is so “scared” of the new president is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

[Disappointment] does not give anybody the right to cry or demand special care because of it. We’re all adults here.

A third respondent went so far as to say: “RESPECT IS REQUIRED, NOT CRYBABY TEMPER-TANTRUMS BECAUSE WE DIDN’T GET OUR WAY.” Such responses dehistoricize and depoliticize reactions of grief, fear, rage, and solidarity. Drawing on their experiences of daily epistemic, physical, and state violence, minoritized students who are fearful of an intensification of this violence are cast as crying babies. In this framing, Trump supporters are imagined as persecuted. One respondent wrote, I am aware that there have been numerous instances of people wearing Donald Trump hats or shirts being accosted or even attacked by so-called anti-racists who are against hate. That is why I’m afraid to wear my “Make America Great Again” hat in public.

Respondents for neutrality argued that the classroom should be “a safe space for BOTH/ALL political parties,” where such a space is predicated on silencing dissent and erasing the structural and everyday effects of racism, colonialism, and hetero-patriarchy.

Toni Morrison (2016) writes of this imaginary of persecution as fear of lost status, where white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. . . . Only the frightened would do that. Right? (para. 4) This rationale appropriates the language of safe space, language created through feminist/queer, and women-of-color-led movements to create less-violent institutional spaces (Ellsworth, 1989). Here, safe space means space where white people are free to live out a white supremacist imaginary free of bearing witness to the humanity of their non-white, non-heteronormative, (dis)abled, or non-English-speaking peers and students.

The second rationale for classroom neutrality drew on conceptions of the ideal learning child and educative environment as untainted by and sheltered from politics.

Yet, as many have argued, children always already live in the real world and deal with and regularly think about issues of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality (Milner,

90 Dyke, Gordon, & Job 2010). Educators and undergraduate education majors responding to the survey with accounts of their K–12 students’ and peers’ responses to election discourses illuminate that classrooms are porous spaces where, for better or worse, students do not and cannot leave their beliefs, worries, bodies, histories, or ways of knowing at the door. One teacher wrote, I allowed my third grade students to write about their thoughts and feelings the Wednesday after the election. . . . One Hispanic girl wrote how her father has told her to keep a bag packed and ready. Another girl, she is mixed African American and Caucasian, wrote how she was sad because her family is already poor and she fears they will become even more poor [sic] and is scared because she doesn’t really know what more poor will look like and entail for her. I had another student who stated to one of my Hispanic students that she should pack her bags because she would be going back to Mexico. After speaking with his grandmother and her talking to him he felt terrible. He was repeating what he heard from another adult and did not realize the impact of what he was saying.

This and other similar responses reveal that, of course, students bring the overwhelming and pervasive (beyond and within school) racialized, gendered, and classed electionrelated discourses with them into the classroom. As this teacher indicates, without space to process these discourses, white students may perpetuate violence unknowingly or without deeper understanding of what they are reproducing. At the same time, by creating spaces to engage with political questions, educators can support working-class students and students of color in making sense of the visceral fears and violence that shape their daily lives.

Considerations for Moving Forward With many educational institutions, including our own, appropriating multicultural rhetoric––often while avoiding deeper structural transformations that would substantively address institutional racism and sexism––the fear of and anger at dissent exemplified in many responses, and the separation of schooling from the political, is deeply entwined with the historical relationship between education and nation-building (Meiners, 2002).

Further, the survey’s deeply divided responses illuminate that Oklahoma’s volatile political environment is perpetuated by efforts to limit spaces to meaningfully engage and think through the relations and practices that shape our daily lives here. Our strategies for moving forward turn on a theory-praxis process. We plan to conduct an interview study with K–12 and higher-education faculty members to continue to better understand the experiences of educators in navigating the “aftermath” of the 2016 presidential election–– while also making sense of the continuity of struggle for many here. We continue to engage our colleagues in pedagogical discussions and organizing toward making our institution take a strong stance against racialized, gendered, religious, or other kinds of violence on our campus and in our classrooms. Although it may feel trite to claim in this particular forum that classrooms are political spaces, politicizing education and teacher preparation and education is a perpetual and dynamic problem that is deeply shaped by

Trump and Oklahoma 91 place and history, and we continue to make sense of our work in the specific context of Oklahoma.

Author Biographies Erin Dyke is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies in the School of Teaching and Curriculum Leadership at Oklahoma State University. She recently received her PhD from the University of Minnesota in Curriculum and Instruction. In her dissertation, The Fight for the Right to Teach: Mapping the Terrain of the Diversity Gap in Teacher Education, she theorized the ways teacher education can reproduce the exclusion and marginalization of people of color and indigenous people from teaching and curriculum.

Her research interests include pedagogies of social movement spaces; activist research methods; social justice, abolitionist, and de-colonial movements in education; and gender/sexuality and education.

Sarah Gordon is an Assistant Professor in the School of Educational Studies at Oklahoma State University and a Research Associate for the Center for Educational Research and Evaluation. She holds her PhD in Research, Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics. She teaches courses in program evaluation, research methods, and assessment.

Her research interests include perceptions and utilization of evaluation and assessment in higher education, student retention issues, and diversity as a concept and learning outcome in higher education.

Jennifer Job is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies at Oklahoma State University. Her research focuses on the political contexts of education and data assessment of teacher programs. She is the director of the Oklahoma State University Urban Teacher Preparation Academy—Oklahoma City. She is a section editor for The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing and advisory board member for The High School Journal. She is co-author of the curriculum U-STARS~Plus Science and Nonfiction Connections, and her work has been published in The Handbook of Educational Research, National Teacher Education Journal, The High School Journal, Youth Voice Journal, and Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices. She earned her PhD in Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

References Oklahoma earns a D-plus on state report card, ranks 46th in nation. (2016). Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/qc/2016/statehighlights/2016/01/07/oklahoma-education-ranking.html Eger, A. (2015, September 21). Teachers struggle with low pay, working conditions.

Tulsa World. Retrieved from http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/education/teachersstruggle-with-low-pay-working-conditions/article_19cf352a-3743-5026-b6de78cc867fd39a.html Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–325. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.59.3.058342114k266250

92 Dyke, Gordon, & Job Ellsworth, S. (1992). Death in a promised land: The Tulsa race riot of 1921 (8th ed.).

Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.

Evans, R. W., Avery, P. G., & Pederson, P. V. (2000). Taboo topics: Cultural restraint on teaching social issues. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, 73(5), 295–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/000986500096000973 Fernandez, M. (2016, December 26). An Oklahoma Newspaper Endorsed Clinton. It Hasn’t Been Forgiven. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/26/us/oklahoma-newspaper-hillary-clintonendorsement.html?_r=0 Gershman, J. (2013, August 16). Oklahoma ban on Sharia Law unconstitutional, U.S. judge rules. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/08/16/oklahoma-ban-on-sharia-law-unconstitutionalus-judge-rules/ Grumet, M. R. (1989). Generations: Reconceptualist curriculum theory and teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 40(1), 13–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224871890400102 Hess, D. E. (2004). Controversies about controversial issues in democratic education.

Political Science and Politics, 37(2), 257–261. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1049096504004196 Lesko, N. (1996). Denaturalizing adolescence: The politics of contemporary representations. Youth & Society, 28(2), 139–161. https://doi.org/10.1177.0044118x96028002001 Levin, B. (2008). Curriculum policy and the politics of what should be learned in school.

In F. M. Connely, M. F. He, & J. Phillion (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of curriculum and instruction (pp. 7–24). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publishing.

Martin, J. A., Hamilton, B. E., Osterman, M. J K., Curtin, S. C., & Mathews, T. J. (2013, December 30). Births: Final data for 2012. National Vital Statistics Reports, 62(9), 1–67. Retrieved from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr62/nvsr62_09.pdf Meiners, E. R. (2015). Trouble with the child in the carceral state. Social Justice, 41(3), 120–144. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816692750.003.0003 Morrison, T. (2016, November 21). Making America white again. The New Yorker.

Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/making-americawhite-again Neighbour, B. (1996). Geography teachers and the treatment of controversies. In R. Gerber & J. Lidstone (Eds.), Developments and directions in geographic education (pp. 175–184). Clevedon, UK: Channel View Publications.

New, J. (2015, March 9). Fraternity caught on video singing racist song. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/03/09/fraternity-caught-videosinging-racist-song Roediger, D. R. (1999). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. New York, NY: Verso Books.

Sillin, J. G. (1995). Sex, death, and the education of children: Our passion for ignorance in the age of AIDS. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Trump and Oklahoma 93 Southern Poverty Law Center (2016). After election day, the Trump Effect: The impact of the 2016 presidential election on our nation’s schools. Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/the_trump_effect.pdf Stradling, R. (1984). The teaching of controversial issues: An evaluation. Educational Review, 36(2), 121–129. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013191840360202 Thampi, M. (1975). Politics in the English classroom. Social Scientist, 4(3), 76–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/3516356 Zezima, K. (2015, July 16). Obama greeted by protesters waving Confederate flags in Oklahoma. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/07/16/obama-greetedby-protesters-waving-confederate-flags-in-oklahoma/?utm_term=.d30fd97f5166 Ziegler, H. (1967). The political life of American teachers. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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Made You Look: Reflecting on the Trump Election and Patterns of False Response Adam Freas and Jesus Limon-Guzman1 Sacramento City College

100 Years and Running* Before the start of this past fall semester, our campus, a large Northern California community college, celebrated its 100th anniversary. One of the lead programs featured a panel of current faculty, staff, and students, in addition to a former Japanese American student who attended the college during World War II. As a student, she experienced our government’s efforts to round up Japanese Americans for imprisonment in internment camps. She shared her experiences during that time and provided pictures from the campus, which offered some insight into how the college responded, or failed to respond, to such a deplorable time in our country’s history.

Without ill regard, her powerful retelling of her student experiences provided an opportunity for the panelists and campus as a whole to reflect on and process how our histories impact our current institutional practices and students. Her story offered an opportunity for us to contextualize our current role as a public institution of education.

Instead, however, the panel and campus at large responded minimally to this conversation; it may have been startling or inspiring in the moment, but few actions or outcomes were attached. Most attendees returned to the normalcy of preparing for the upcoming semester and did not fully reflect on the relevancy of her story.

Yet fast-forward to the middle of the fall semester, and the presidential election uncovered the beliefs and practices of our larger society, creating a crucial time for educational institutions and spaces to hold exactly these conversations about institutional history and responsibility. Within that discourse, many non-dominant communities and the educational institutions that served them would face uncertain futures depending on the outcome. The election included the soon-to-be victor, Donald Trump, who was campaigning on returning the glory days of America’s past, featuring a more pronounced white idealism and blue-collar industry, while people of color and marginalized populations were more openly targeted by groups, proposed policies, and systems. Our campus’ student population is widely diverse; post-election anxiety and fear were evident and palpable throughout the halls, social spaces, and classrooms of the college.

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Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jesus Limon-Guzman, Department of English, Sacramento City College, 3835 Freeport Blvd, Sacramento, CA 95822. Email: limongj@scc.losrios.edu.

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You Know Our Steez We are two hip-hop educators. We collaborate as an English professor (LimonGuzman) and Extended Opportunities Programs and Services (EOPS) counselor (Freas).

We organize unique student empowerment events and professional developments, and are committed to uplifting marginalized communities. We teach culturally responsive courses, integrate art and social justice into our classrooms, and use social media as a repurposed tool to connect students to the world. One of us is tenured (Freas), and the other (Limon-Guzman) is on a tenure track. We have worked in this community for over 10 years in a range of roles and have witnessed how student needs become intellectualized and forgotten. However, we have also witnessed incredible work take shape through the commitment of passionate educators and students. In that sense, we have heard token, sometimes exploitive, promises and have seen silent, unacknowledged yet impactful labor.

Hence, as a pair of faculty members who are deeply impacted by the results of the election, the following is our reflection and our warning. We aim to move past safe social and political investments and prompt other educators to take an active role in responding to the struggles our communities are likely to face in the following years. We cannot wait to respond. We have to lead.

I Left My Wallet in El Segundo––Freas In the final days of the election, I was attending a statewide EOPS conference, which focused on the practices, models, pedagogies, and student-service approaches associated with the success of low-income and historically marginalized students by the program and its respective campuses. The general mood of the first two days was upbeat, being that the majority of the attendees were a mix of both willing and unenthusiastic (e.g., proBernie Sanders) supporters of Hillary Clinton. These feelings were also supported by how remote the possibility of electing a former reality star––who was openly racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic––seemed. Or so we thought.

The Tipping Point––Limon-Guzman The night of the election, I was giving an in-class writing midterm for my evening class. My students were naturally stressed because of the midterm, and I was growing anxious tracking the results on my phone. Some of my colleagues started texting around 8 p.m. One of them, a sociology professor and youth-development specialist, started the conversation with, “At what point do we start to worry?”

I replied, “Now.” I am a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, a Dreamer, a tenure-track English professor at the same community college that I attended, a lecturer at the university I graduated from, and an organizer in the community that raised me. I came to the country when I was 8 years old; since then, I, like so many other Dreamers, have not taken a single shortcut. I worked full-time to finance my entire education, and organized consistently with multiple groups to increase access to education and literacies in our community. But that night, the night of the election, I felt it all slip away. Just like

Made You Look 97 that, I was back to being an undocumented immigrant, sorting through the options available to plan my next move.

By the time the first student turned in his final, my stomach was twisted into a ball of stress and silent panic. At 10 p.m., I collected the remaining midterms and drove home.

My fiancé was up watching the coverage of the results. She was worried, too. I sat with her, held her hand and tried––tried––to reassure her that everything was going to be okay, regardless of the results. But in my mind, I was running through ideas, options, plans, and actions I could possibly take given the worst possible outcome.

Respiration––Freas The morning after the election, we reconvened per the conference’s morning schedule. The room was full of 500 community-college faculty, staff, and administrators, the majority of whom saw themselves as social-justice advocates; we were devastated by the outcomes. The day before, the same room buzzed with enthusiasm, with attendees invigorated by peers doing work that matters. Now the room felt heavy, and the eyes of many looked like we were at a funeral. Even the energetic speakers scheduled that morning struggled to chip away at the depressive state that permeated the room. We were in disbelief.

As the day went on, the conference focus shifted to address the inescapable heavy feelings and remind us what was now at stake. Calls were flooding in from students and community members from across the state worried about the potential proposed changes of the new administration. Dreamer students were consumed by worry about their families, as well as their own status. I checked in with a fellow conference attendee who told me that his daughter was already assaulted with racial slurs that morning at a gas station in Southern California.

There was a sense of helplessness being at this conference isolated at a hotel, far from our home campuses. Yet, I also found solace being in the presence of fellow educators. We offered each other ears for listening, arms for hugging, and ultimately space for reconnecting with our focus and commitment to social justice and education.

The Next Movement––Limon-Guzman The next morning, when it was official that Trump had won the election, I received an enormous amount of emotional support from a wide range of people who knew my story. Colleagues emailed me, texted me, and walked over to my office to let me know they were there for me. It was heartwarming, but it also elevated my stress. I felt like there was a spotlight on me, and I was asked again and again the same question that had been swirling around in my head: What are you going to do now?

During my classes at the community college, I asked students to share how they felt.

They expressed their concerns. Most of them were shocked and in disbelief. But within the first 20 minutes of each class, they all eventually asked me: How do you feel? What does this mean for you? Can we still take you in the spring? How about English 302?

Will you still be teaching that in the summer? And Puente? What about Puente? Who’s going to teach that now? And what about the Dreamer Experience courses at the university? Will you still teach those?

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I was moved and inspired by my students’ concerns, more so than the support of my colleagues. They were, maybe selfishly, worried about whether I would be there for them during the next few semesters. That shook me out of my self-centered fear and anxiety; it reminded me that I had a responsibility within the community. Some students reminded me that they were only attending this college in order to take my classes. They felt safe in my class because they knew and could relate to my story.

I emailed the Dreamers I was working with and scheduled a meeting. We broke bread and held a circle conversation, and I prompted them to reflect on the challenges that they and their families had already overcome. I asked them to recount their strengths, their skills, their abilities, and their stories; I asked them to look over their scars and remember the journeys they had already traveled. We began healing with our stories and prepared for a new day. And just like that, I was recharged, reenergized, and ready for the work ahead. My role, my commitment to the students, and their trust in me helped me move forward. But it wasn’t an acknowledgement of the threats ahead that united us; it was a conversation and an honest reflection on our strengths that empowered us.

The 6th Sense––Freas We all returned to our campuses finding mixed efforts and responses to the pending changes, which would detrimentally change our educational and community landscapes. I met with fellow educators and students to plan how to support our campus, and its staff, faculty, and students, who may specifically be targeted in the coming months. I met with several Dreamer students who were seeking support and direction, hoping to connect with helpful resources. Many of them talked about dropping out of school to pay for immigration lawyers for their families and themselves. At the same time, some faculty aimed to communicate to our students, campus, and the larger community that we as a college would be a space of refuge. Inspired by the efforts of the City of San Francisco and other colleges and universities, a contingency of faculty, staff, and administration wanted our campus to declare itself a sanctuary space, thus identifying ourselves as a safe space for Dreamers with an imminent shift in immigration policy.

Shook Ones––Limon-Guzman My connection to students is not accidental; I take an active role in recruiting students into my classes. I visit high schools, collaborate with academic advisors, and help organize various outreach events. Likewise, when the college asked to publish an article on my story last year, I intentionally agreed in order to help increase awareness.

During the previous spring semester, the college documented my journey from being an undocumented student, to a DACA recipient, to a tenure-track professor. The article was included in a district-wide publication that was mailed to several thousand households. I was told that the purpose of the article was to increase enrollment by promoting the possibilities available through community college, and I consciously agreed to help that effort.

The college took a gamble and ran my story. But now, would the college or the district support me in a meaningful way? No, not really. The people did through their emotional support. Not the institution. The college, along with so many other institutions, began to express their commitment to students and vowed to protect all students during

Made You Look 99 the Trump presidency, but what about their faculty? Would they make an effort to secure faculty? Would they challenge the federal government to protect us?

In the following weeks, a colleague asked several college and district sources what would happen to DACA tenure-track faculty if Trump repealed DACA. The response was not surprising. One district official wrote, “The employee will likely have to shoulder the burden of dealing with the immigration services. The District does not have resources dedicated to the issue.” This response follows an institutional pattern in which they gradually and silently begin disengaging after assessing the risk. It also aligns with institutional traditions of exploiting the stories and struggles of individuals to symbolize support and connection in order to, above all, elevate institutional status, just as they did when they used the story of the Japanese American alumna to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the college.

False Prophets––Freas When dealing with issues around people of color, social justice, and whiteness in educational spaces, I have observed a norming response. In many cases, as educators and institutions synthesize the issue into intellectualized discourse, the situation becomes more palatable, particularly for educators with dominant cultural identities, and limits the extent of the investment in truly addressing the issue. In this case, one example was the faculty’s trepidation around the term sanctuary, causing enough hands to be raised and ultimately throwing the movement into the educational vortex of bureaucracy. As it currently stands, the State Chancellor’s Office has communicated—through its December 5, 2016, press release—its choice to resist offering any support to law enforcement or share any student records in relation to the pending changes, accompanied by suggested guidelines for the 114 California Community Colleges (California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, 2016).

Ain’t Sayin’ Nothin’ New There is a process of institutional silencing that comes from overly complicated discourse. That silence, however, is itself a response. It is an active attempt to neglect, to turn the other way, to pretend nothing is happening, meanwhile vocalizing concern and support. It becomes a checkbox for the conscience, while staying in a mode of selfpreservation, in particular for those who fit the dominant frameworks of privilege. This process––this tokenized empathy, over-celebrated heroism, and gradual paralysis––is what we have to move against. We cannot be distracted by discourse and dialogue that does not actually create movement, especially in times when actions are indispensable.

So much of our time and energy can be lost in chasing an option that creates zero impact.

This begs the question: How do we know what conversations we need to pay attention to and what conversations to avoid? This is a dilemma we battle with constantly, especially because the returns of a token conversation often appear to be so grand and rewarding. If we just get this policy right, then we will be in the clear to do so much more and make large-scale change. Or, if we specify and line up our objectives, then our efforts to address equity will be supported. However, the reality is that by the time all of the preliminary work is done, the students and the community have already been impacted.

100 Freas & Limon-Guzman Instead, we argue that focusing on movement and building communities of support are the starting point. Too often we assume that unless it is fully planned, it cannot happen, as though we do not have the capability to improvise and find direction as we build. In this sense, building a community of support and of social justice-minded educators should be a priority. We should focus on connecting with folks who will be our allies right now, folks who trust us and will not require a bureaucratic trail of documents to get involved. These partnerships are necessary and instrumental in helping students in dire need. These partnerships should expand across disciplines, institutions, grade levels, and communities. If nothing else, we should look at the next four years as an opportunity to unify based on our shared struggles, collective strengths, and intentions to act.

Likewise, we, as educators, should re-envision ways we can utilize assignments to prepare students. We should seek ways to empower students by constantly prompting them to recognize their strengths, not just through a reflection assignment, but also through a habitual process. Our students have to build confidence to face the world ahead, and we must prompt them to do so through the acknowledgement of their realities and the histories that are attached to them. It continues to be important that our spaces foster inclusiveness and value the importance of narratives, which, in turn, supports agency and self-efficacy.

If DACA is repealed, some of the most difficult questions we will face as a community of educators will be: How do we support our DACA colleagues who lose their work permits? Do we limit our support to moral offerings? Do we take on an extended battle with immigration services and the federal government? Both of these options appear to be busy responses with minimal genuine impact, especially in a discussion about the employment and livelihood of our fellow educators. Instead, we should use our understanding of local systems to figure out ways to provide economic relief for impacted DACA faculty to provide the sustainable means to take on the longer battles ahead. Are there resources available for contract work? Can we use available established pathways to contract former faculty as consultants? Obviously these are not ideal options, but we are not facing ideal conditions. We are facing conditions that require risks, and conditions that will test our courage and our commitment to principles.

If the Trump administration delivers on his promises, the years ahead will only bring security and comfort to the privileged, the indifferent, and the docile. The rest of us will have work to do.

Conclusion: The Ultralight Beam As we reflect on this experience and prepare for the near future, it is critical that we as educators and students stay committed to changing lives. However, the cost of achieving such a profound goal will require all of us to begin or continue radical advocacy paired with action. It must go beyond campus pamphlets. This will vary depending on who you are and where you exist, but there is work to be done no matter the situation. We ask you to be aware of the distractions, keep institutions accountable, form bonds with allies, recommit to principles of social justice and, above all else, empower students by prompting them to recognize their strengths, especially during times when the world attempts to highlight their deficits.

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Made You Look 101 *Section Heading Playlist: Preferably Played at Loud Volumes A Tribe Called Quest (1990). I left my wallet in El Segundo. On People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm [CD]. New York, NY: Jive Records.

Black Star. (1998). Respiration. On Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star [CD]. New York, NY: Rawkus Records.

California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. (2016). California community colleges chancellor’s office provides guidance related to undocumented students [Press release]. Retrieved from http://californiacommunitycolleges.cccco.edu/Portals/0/DocDownloads/PressRelease s/DEC2016/PR-Principles-12-5-16-FINAL.pdf Cole, J. (2016). False prophets [single]. New York, NY: Dreamville, Roc Nation, Interscope.

Common (2000). The 6th sense. On Like Water for Chocolate [CD]. Santa Monica, CA: MCA Records.

Gang Starr (1998). You know my steez. On Moment of Truth [CD]. New York, NY: Virgin Records.

Mobb Deep (1994). Shook ones [single]. New York, NY: Loud/RCA/BMG Records.

N.W.A. (1990). 100 miles and running. On 100 Miles and Running [EP]. Los Angeles, CA: Ruthless/Priority.

The Roots (1999a). The next movement. On Things Fall Apart [CD]. Santa Monica, CA: MCA. The Roots (1999b). Ain’t sayin’ nothin’ new. On Things Fall Apart [CD]. Santa Monica, CA: MCA. The Roots (2004). The Tipping Point [CD]. Santa Monica, CA: Geffen, Interscope.

West, K. (2016). Ultralight beam. On The Life of Pablo [CD]. New York, NY: GOOD, Def Jam. Author Biographies Adam Freas is a doctoral candidate in the Benerd School of Education at the University of the Pacific. His current research interests examine hip-hop education, white privilege, and historically marginalized student populations in higher education.

He is also a counselor and instructor for the EOPS program at Sacramento City College.

Jesus Limon-Guzman is an Assistant Professor of English at Sacramento City College. His current research interests examine the impact of culturally responsive texts and student-teacher relationships in the writing classroom.

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Available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre

Can the DREAM Still Exist?

Cheryl Burleigh1 University of Phoenix

Applying and being accepted to a college or university of their choice is a rite of passage and dream of high school seniors. For students who are immigrants and undocumented, the ability to attend college is a challenge made easier through the United We Dream organization and the DREAM Education Empowerment Program. When meeting with a group of students who depend on such programs and DREAM Act grants for support, the conversation about their education and future shifted from the application process to the events of the presidential election and, after the inauguration, to what the future may hold. The following is a three-stanza progression poem based on this discussion: I DREAM of

a better tomorrow, brighter future, a fresh start, a college education, being challenged by like-minded individuals, finding others like me, independence, expanding my horizons, and a better life.

I DREAM of

no boundaries, no walls, not living in fear, my family staying together in the U.S., finding my parents home tonight, being able to walk freely without anxiety, not looking over my shoulder, trusting the police, and not being reported, deported.

I DREAM of

our voices being heard, positive political action, unity, a movement of activism,

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Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Cheryl Burleigh, EdD. Email: cburleigh@email.phoenix.edu.

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Burleigh equality embracing diversity, earning my college degree, supporting my family, kindness, compassion, humanity, freedom, and hope.

Author Biography Cheryl Burleigh is a research fellow, associate faculty, and faculty supervisor for the University of Phoenix. Dr. Burleigh is an advocate for educational change and awareness, empowering educators and administrators to support positive transformation within school systems. Her academic research interests include ethical decision-making, educational law, female students’ empowerment in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), school leadership, educational equity, and LGBTQ issues. Dr. Burleigh has presented on science education curriculum and practices and educational leadership for school programs and administrators, state teacher associations, and national and international conferences, and on behalf of the National Air and Space Administration (NASA). She has won numerous grants and awards for curriculum and leadership development. Dr. Burleigh recently completed a series of observational studies of international education practices of economically disadvantaged and underserved students.

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Available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre

Understanding and Undermining Fake News From the Classroom Adam Rosenzweig1 Beyond 12

Fake News and the Post-Truth Era It’s too soon to know what will define Donald Trump’s presidency, but one of the defining characteristics of his campaign was a near-total disregard for facts. According to PolitiFact (“Donald Trump’s file,” n.d.), about 70% of Trump’s statements have been either mostly false, completely false, or outright lies. Candidate Trump wasn’t the only one dealing in dishonesty, but the ubiquity of falsehood surrounding his election contributed to the Oxford Dictionaries naming post-truth its 2016 Word of the Year.

Fake news (Drobnic Holan, 2016) might be the most pernicious form of post-truth.

PolitiFact called fake news its Lie of the Year, pointing out that fake news is “the boldest sign of a post-truth society” (para. 12) and that it “found a willing enabler in Trump” (para. 8). Americans should perceive this phenomenon as an existential threat to democracy. What truths remain self-evident if truth itself becomes counterfeit? A posttruth society has no moral center, no basis for conversation, no shared future.

If the Trump era is to be the era of post-truth, then schools will have a particularly critical role to play in teaching students to favor reason and evidence over sentiment and preconception. More simply, we need to get better at teaching what Carl Sagan (1995) called “the fine art of baloney detection” (p. 201). Educators must also help students explore and deliberate on political issues. This article examines several particular challenges of fake news on the internet, and offers strategies and resources to support critical thinking and positive political engagement in the classroom.

The Particular Challenges of Fake News on the Internet Fake news has a long and brutal history (Soll, 2016) that far precedes what contemporary readers might think of as “real news.” The three elements that separate fake news from real news are fabrication (i.e., fake news is conjured rather than reported), deception (i.e., fake news is designed to persuade rather than inform), and virality (i.e., fake news thrives on superficiality and escalation rather than depth and moderation). What’s new about the modern version? Drobnic Holan (2016) describes it aptly as “made-up stuff, masterfully manipulated to look like credible journalistic reports that are easily spread online to large audiences willing to believe the fictions and spread the word” (para. 2). Fake news on the internet is fueled by technologies and business models that present at least four particular challenges that suggest new approaches to the way teachers and students approach media.

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Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to: Adam Rosenzweig. Email: adam.lev.rosenzweig@gmail.com.

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The first challenge of fake news on the internet is a new organizing principle used by social media to present information. Imagine walking into the bulk-food section of your local grocery store where you can scoop and bag your own dried goods. You fill a bag with flour and then head home to bake a cake. However, as you eat the cake, you suddenly realize that it doesn’t taste right. In fact, it tastes really wrong. You go back to the grocery store and, to your horror, realize that you accidentally took home a bag of rat poison, which was right next to the flour. They’re both fine white powders.

Why does that thought experiment seem far-fetched? Likely, it’s because the idea of two completely different kinds of items sitting next to each other on a shelf violates the organizing principle that we expect in grocery stores. Typically, grocery stores group items by product category rather than, say, texture or color. The same principle extends to news: Grocery stores typically don’t position The New York Times alongside National Enquirer because most people understand that tabloids and gossip magazines are in a different category than the real news. (We might label that category “junk” since it’s often next to the candy bars in the checkout line.)

In contrast, social media companies like Facebook leverage novel technologies and business models to decouple content from its original source and re-aggregate it under a different organizing principle. This ability to mix and match articles from different sources has forced major changes in traditional news outlets and given birth to countless new ones. For example, in 2015, the Washington Post (WashPostPR, 2015) announced that it would begin releasing all of its content––about 1,200 pieces each day––as individual items on Facebook. As a result, Facebook can place a story from the Post next to something as fake as a story about Hillary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS (e.g., “BOOM! Wikileaks Confirms,” 2016), so long as both publishers pay for the spot.

On one hand, this decoupling and re-aggregating enables individuals to consume content from a variety of sources within a single application. On the other, it means that everyone consuming news via social media––62% of adults according to Pew Research Center (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016)––needs to assess the veracity of every single article that comes across their feed individually. Understanding this new organizing principle is critical for navigating the information ecosystem.

The second challenge of fake news on the internet is anonymity. Pseudonymous authorship is nothing new and, in many cases, serves a legitimate purpose; but the internet has enabled and normalized anonymous publication in new ways, which is problematic in the world of news. The ability to obscure one’s identity by publishing from behind a handle (or multiple handles) is central to the model of platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Anonymity is anathema to professional journalism because it undermines the reader’s ability to assess an author’s credibility. Anonymity is also a shield from personal responsibility, empowering people to create and spread false information with practically no individual consequences. As a result, the identifiability and track record of journalists––a “trusted filter within civil society” (Soll, 2016, para.

17)––has never been more valuable.

The third challenge of fake news on the internet is the filter bubble. This phenomenon was originally described by Eli Pariser (2011) in the context of onlinesearch products whose algorithms learn to deliver personalized results to each user. The result is that two different people can search for the same term on the same search engine,

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but receive different results. In The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information, Frank Pasquale (2015) warns that hyper-personalization creates “a perfect little world of our own, a world tailored so exquisitely to our individual interests and preferences that it is different from the world as seen by anyone else” (p.

60). This uniqueness is particularly problematic in the context of news because productive discourse in a diverse society requires participants to share a common base of facts.

Filter bubbles confound the deceptively simple act of internet searches. As Education Week’s Liana Heitin (2016) recently noted, “[P]art of digital literacy is learning to search for content in an online space. Students have to query a search engine using keywords and navigate those results” (“Finding and consuming,” para. 9). Before the algorithmic search, teachers could expect students to apply a common research protocol to a question or subject and discover similar information. There were simply fewer sources of truth at the end of each search. “At least with a dead-tree newspaper,” writes Pasquale (2015), “we know that everybody looking at it sees the same thing” (p. 60).

Digital literacy must reckon with the effects of filter bubbles, which are difficult to deconstruct because of their opacity. Corporations like Google have every incentive to keep the logic underlying our personalized search results a secret. “[T]heir dominance is so complete,” writes Pasquale, “and their technology so complex, that they have escaped pressures for transparency and accountability that kept traditional media answerable to the public” (p. 61). Teachers and students––indeed, all of us––are left with the disconcerting task of relying on search engines to navigate the world of information that has been selected for us by a for-profit enterprise. “Instead of a balanced information diet,” says Pariser (2011), “you can end up surrounded by information junk food.” Recall where the tabloids live in the grocery store.

The fourth challenge of fake news on the internet is echo chambers. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (2016a) published a post after the election to directly address claims that fake news on Facebook had a material impact on the election. He wrote that “more than 99% of what people see [on Facebook] is authentic” (para. 4). A user (Williquette, 2016) commented on Zuckerberg’s post, arguing that his personal feed seemed to have a greater share of fake news than what the company’s CEO was claiming. Replying to the user, Zuckerberg (2016b) wrote, “The stat I mentioned [about fake news] is across the whole system. Depending on which pages you personally follow and who your friends are, you may see more or less. The power of Facebook is that you control what you see by who you choose to connect with.” Likely without realizing it, Zuckerberg described the mechanism of the echo chamber. As Sam Sanders (2016) of NPR noted, “At its core, [Facebook is] a platform meant to connect users with people they already like, not to foster discussion with those you might disagree with” (“A problem with format,” para. 2).

Although it’s true that Facebook users are free to connect with whomever they want, those connections, and every other action a user takes on the site, feed algorithms that directly govern what each user sees in their news feed. These content algorithms are complex (McGee, 2013) and constantly changing (Blank & Xu, 2016). Not unlike slot machines, which are designed to addict their users (Dow Schüll, 2013), social media algorithms are designed to identify your preferences and then aggressively “reward” you with content that’s satisfyingly affirming. Fake news thrives in this environment with

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headlines, images, and ideas that prey on our prejudice and corroborate the other content in our feed.

The Political Classroom Thus, educators must create appropriate spaces to help students meet these particular challenges accompanying fake news on the internet. Space, in this context, is not physical, but the intellectual and emotional permission to explore political topics.

Although the underlying ideology of post-truth is nonpartisan, its expression as fake news almost always takes sides. Therefore, in order for educators and students to address these issues, they must embrace what Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy (2015) call “the political classroom.”

Few could argue that education is apolitical. At the same time, however, public education should not promote any particular political party or partisan ideology. Hess and McAvoy describe this paradox as “the need to provide students with a nonpartisan political education on the one hand, with the need to prepare them to participate in the actual, highly partisan political community on the other” (p. 4). Their research reveals several aspects of positive political classrooms.

The first is a student-centered learning objective. The purpose of the political classroom should be to “help students develop their ability to deliberate political questions” (p. 4). This puts students at the center of the exercise, empowering them to be proactive participants in the process and encouraging them to engage with other students as equals. In this way, student-centered learning is critical training to combat the passive acceptance of offensive and inaccurate information that is often found in fake news.

The second aspect of positive political classroom space is the distinction between deliberation and discussion. Drawing on Walter Parker (2003), Hess and McAvoy (2015) explain that discussions are meant to share information and explore topics, whereas deliberations are meant to employ that information in order to resolve some shared problem or question. “To clarify this difference,” write Hess and McAvoy, “students might discuss the meaning of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution but deliberate the question ‘Should there be laws against the private ownership of assault weapons?’” (p. 5).

A third important aspect of the space is social equality. One practical consequence of segregation is the existence of classrooms that lack the diversity of society in general.

This presents a challenge to the positive political classroom and democratic education. In these situations, teachers may need to enrich the space and challenge students by introducing new ideas. Alternatively, a heterogeneous classroom may contain fault lines around privilege and prejudice, requiring teachers to moderate these dynamics to ensure that every student’s voice is represented equally in deliberation.

Of course, teachers are the most important ingredient in the political classroom. The space described here cannot exist in environments where teachers are simply expected to administer a rote curriculum, or where teachers are uncomfortable learning alongside their students. As Hess and McAvoy (2015) put it, “teachers have a responsibility to recognize that as professionals, their expertise about content, pedagogy, and their students make it not just acceptable but essential for them to participate in decisions about what and how to teach” (p. 208). If we are to escape the era of post-truth, then

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school systems and educators themselves must renew commitments to the professionalization of teaching.

Domain Knowledge and Digital Literacy The prevalence of fake news belies a widespread inability to distinguish fact from fiction. In addition to creating conducive spaces, educators and students must have a foundation of knowledge on which to base their deliberations and against which they can assess what they see in the world. This foundation of knowledge expands on traditional digital literacy curricula.

Many educators are familiar with efforts to teach digital literacy. However, in a brilliant blog post, Mike Caulfield (2016) explains an important shortcoming of traditional, process-based approaches to digital literacy: In the metaphor of most educators, there’s a set of digital or information literacy skills, which is sort of like the factory process. And there’s data, which is like raw material. You put the data through the critical literacy process and out comes useful information on the other side. . . . In reality, most literacies are heavily domain-dependent, and based not on skills, but on a body of knowledge that comes from mindful immersion in a context. (para. 2) Take Rustling (2016), for example, which BuzzFeed (Silverman, 2016) found to be the most engaging piece of fake news on Facebook in 2016. The headline read, “Obama Signs Executive Order Banning the Pledge of Allegiance in Schools Nationwide.” A knowledgeable consumer of information might know that the Pledge of Allegiance has generated controversy at various times throughout its history, and that attempts to ban its use in schools are not unprecedented (Nieves, 2002), which may lead them to click on the article if they came across this headline on Facebook. At that point, the knowledgeable consumer might quickly notice several glaring clues that the story is fake, such as the URL domain (abcnews.com.co), non-sequitur quotations attributed to the head of a fake charity (http://sockitforward.com), and the author’s own spurious biography (“Articles by Jimmy Rustling,” n.d.). Even if a knowledgeable consumer happened to believe that the story was true, they would likely expect it to be corroborated by other news sources.

How does a knowledgeable consumer know to look for these things? Surely some skill-based protocol may be applied, such as learning to “decode” URLs; but, as Caulfield (2016) writes, [T]he person who has immersed themselves in the material of the news over time in a reflective way starts that process with three-quarters a race’s head start. They look at a page and they already have a hypothesis they can test––“Is this site a New World Order conspiracy site?” The person without the background starts from nothing and nowhere. (para. 12) Domain knowledge cannot be separated from digital literacy.

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Resources There are many resources to help educators create appropriate spaces and tackle these issues with students. Embracing social media in the classroom is a good place to start. A recent episode of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered (Turner & Lonsdorf, 2016) on the subject of fake news and schools points out that, “instead of teaching students the fundamentals of fact-checking, many schools simply ignore the problem, blocking social media sites on school computers” (“Damn,” para. 5). Pretending that social media has no place in the classroom is arbitrary and foolish. Instead, teachers can work with students to consider the benefits and risks of social media. Ask, “What is social media great at? What is it bad at? How might we use social media in the pursuit of truth?”

There are also many new ways to find relevant and appropriate content for all students. Newsela.com offers teachers a library of current-events articles at five different reading levels on a variety of subjects. Many of the articles are also available in Spanish.

There’s also a text set (Newsela Staff, n.d.) specifically on media literacy. Countable.us and iCitizen.com are part of a growing list of free, nonpartisan apps designed to educate and engage people with all levels of government. Teachers should also explore Common Sense Media’s K–12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum (https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship), which offers free, standards-aligned lesson plans, games, and more on subjects like searching strategically and identifying high-quality sites. Another exciting resource is the News Literacy Project’s checkology virtual classroom (http://www.thenewsliteracyproject.org/services/checkology), which helps teachers and students learn to discern the quality of various online media.

Post-truth and its expression as fake news are a threat to democracy, but educators are uniquely positioned to fight back. The single most important resource for understanding and undermining fake news is also the one thing that every educator strives to inspire in their students: critical thinking. All teachers, regardless of subject or grade level, can practice “the fine art of baloney detection” (Sagan, 1995, p. 201) with their students. Teachers can help students build political intelligence without promoting partisan politics. They can defend the importance of domain knowledge without renouncing skills and processes. They can exercise professional judgment without equivocating between truth and lies.

Author Biography Adam Rosenzweig is a parent and former educator. He is currently Director of Business Development and Partnerships at Beyond 12, a national nonprofit whose mission is to dramatically increase the number of low-income, first-generation, and historically underrepresented students who graduate from college. He earned a bachelor’s degree in History from Pitzer College and a master’s degree in Education Policy and Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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References Articles by Jimmy Rustling, ABC News. (n.d.). ABC News. Retrieved from http://abcnews.com.co/author/abcnews/ Blank, M., & Xu, J. (2016, April 21). News feed FYI: More articles you want to spend time viewing. Facebook Newsroom. Retrieved from https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/04/news-feed-fyi-more-articles-you-want-tospend-time-viewing/ BOOM! Wikileaks confirms Hillary sold weapons to ISIS. (2016, October 7). Truth Inside of You. Retrieved from https://www.truthinsideofyou.org/boom-wikileaksconfirms-hillary-sold-weapons-to-isis/ Caulfield, M. (2016, December 19). Yes, digital literacy. But which one? [Web log post].

Retrieved from https://hapgood.us/2016/12/19/yes-digital-literacy-but-which-one/ Donald Trump’s file. (n.d.). PolitiFact. Retrieved from http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/ Dow Schüll, N. (2013, October 10). Slot machines are designed to addict. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/10/09/arecasinos-too-much-of-a-gamble/slot-machines-are-designed-to-addict Drobnic Holan, A. (2016, December 13). 2016 lie of the year: Fake news. PolitiFact.

Retrieved from http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/dec/13/2016-lieyear-fake-news/ Gottfried, J., & Shearer, E. (2016, May 26). News use across social media platforms 2016. Pew Research Center, Journalism & Media. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms2016/ Heitin, L. (2016, November 8). What is digital literacy? Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/11/09/what-is-digital-literacy.html Hess, D. E., & McAvoy, P. (2015). The political classroom: Evidence and ethics in democratic education. New York, NY: Routledge.

McGee, M. (2013, August, 16). EdgeRank is dead: Facebook’s news feed algorithm now has close to 100K weight factors. Marketing Land. Retrieved from https://marketingland.com/edgerank-is-dead-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-nowhas-close-to-100k-weight-factors-55908 Newsela Staff. (n.d.). Text set: Media literacy in the 21st century. Newsela. Retrieved from https://newsela.com/text-sets/146690/media-literacy Nieves, E. (2002, June 27). Judges ban pledge of allegiance from schools, citing “under God.” The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/27/us/judges-ban-pledge-of-allegiance-fromschools-citing-under-god.html Pariser, E. (2011, March). Beware online “filter bubbles.” TED: Ideas Worth Sharing [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles? utm_source=tedcomshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=tedspread Parker, W. (2003). Teaching democracy: Unity and diversity in public life (Vol. 14). New York, NY: Teacher’s College Press.

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Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Post-truth. (2016). In Oxford English Dictionaries. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 Rustling, J. (2016, December, 11). Obama signs executive order banning the pledge of allegiance in schools nationwide. ABC News. Retrieved from http://abcnews.com.co/obama-executive-order-bans-pledge-of-allegiance-in-schools/ Sagan, C. (1995). The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark. New York, NY: Random House.

Sanders, S. (2016, November 8). Did social media ruin Election 2016? NPR. Retrieved from www.npr.org/2016/11/08/500686320/did-social-media-ruin-election-2016 Silverman, C. (2016, December 30). Here are 50 of the biggest fake news hits on Facebook from 2016. BuzzFeed. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/top-fake-news-of2016?bftwnews&utm_term=.oypJEA1PY#.xqOO0QBye Soll, J. (2016, December 18). The long and brutal history of fake news. Politico.

Retrieved from http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/fake-news-historylong-violent-214535 Turner, C., & Lonsdorf, K. (2016, December, 22). The classroom where fake news fails.

NPREd. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/12/22/505432340/theclassroom-where-fake-news-fails WashPostPR (2015, September 22). The Washington Post launches instant articles on Facebook. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2015/09/22/the-washington-post-launchesinstant-articles-on-facebook/?utm_term=.90e6a6daf70d Williquette, B. (2016, November 12). If you really believe your statement [Facebook post response]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103253901916271?comment_d=101032539 17135771 Zuckerberg, M. (2016, November 12a). I want to share some thoughts on Facebook and the election [Facebook post]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103253901916271 Zuckerberg, M. (2016, November 12b). The stat I mentioned [Facebook post response]. https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103253901916271?comment_id=10103253 917135771&reply_comment_id=132966740376798

Available online at http://Escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre

Designing an Intervention to Promote Critical Thinking About Statistics in the General Public Leela Velautham1 University of California, Berkeley

“One in five American households do not have a single member in the labor force.”

This was a statistic heralded by President-elect Donald Trump (Appelbaum, 2016, para.

2), in a speech during the election campaign, to illustrate the apparently huge number of unemployed Americans and, thus, to expose the perilous state of the American economy.

However, if considered critically, this is also a statistic that is incredibly misleading.

Trump may be correct that fewer Americans, as a percentage of the total population, are engaged in traditional employment today compared to previous decades. However, the statistic above is not proof that more Americans are unemployed and, indeed, is more indicative of the fact that 20% of American households are headed by retirees (Jacobson, 2016). In this statistic, Trump is tacitly classifying retirees, 16-to-17-year-olds, and stayat-home parents as being within the ranks of the unemployed. Although this classification may be technically accurate, it misleads the public about the general state of the economy.

The recent election campaign was characterized and arguably won on the basis of such bald misinformation and the mischaracterization of seemingly authoritative and objective statistics, figures, and facts. In a year dominated by the twin phenomena of fake news (Holan, 2016) and post-truth politics (Wang, 2016), it is more vital than ever to foster the general public’s critical thinking about the numbers and statistics used––and abused––by business leaders, advocates, and policymakers. In this paper, I will describe an intervention designed to foster such critical thinking, and to enable the public to better distinguish between misleading and representative statistics. I will describe the development of this intervention, informed by our understanding of how people reason about statistics and numbers within the context of topics in the public domain, as well as techniques to foster critical thinking in the classroom.

The Impact of Statistics A prevailing view in the realm of social psychology has been that of cultural cognition—the idea that people form risk perceptions and thus make decisions and form worldviews that cohere strongly with their cultural and political values (Kahan, JenkinsSmith, & Braman, 2011). This theory is used to explain why certain groups do not believe in climate change or the effectiveness of vaccines, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. This is because groups have a tendency to view empirical evidence in a biased manner, confirming evidence that fits with their beliefs at face value, while holding disconfirming evidence to higher critical standards (Lord, Ross

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Velautham 114 & Lepper, 1979). People are thus unswayed by facts that do not fit within their existing views, discarding information that is contrary to their closely held beliefs. However, cultural cognition theory has been repeatedly discounted by experiments carried out by The Reasoning Group at University of California Berkeley, which has empirically demonstrated the catalyzing effect of even a single, critical statistic in changing a citizen’s view on a social issue or policy, regardless of political or group identification (Ranney, Munnich, & Lamprey, 2016).

The power of germane numbers can be illustrated by a study carried out by Ranney, Cheng, Nelson, and Garcia de Osuna in 2001. In this study, the researchers asked U.S.based participants to estimate the current legal immigration rate and state their preference for what they thought this rate should ideally be. The median estimate was a rate of 10%, with the median initial preference to keep the status quo (i.e., a rate of 10%). The participants were then shown the actual legal immigration rate, which was 0.3%. After receiving this feedback, the median participant switched from their status-quo policy to wanting immigration to become thrice its current rate (i.e., 1%)—a belief revision and change in policy preference prompted by one single, salient number.

It is a general belief that one’s views on topics such as immigration, global warming, or nationalism are based on a series of connected ideas that include personal experiences, media information, religious opinion, and more general epistemic and experiential understandings of the topic. However, when exposed to a particularly surprising or shocking number, these understandings are challenged, inducing a cognitive conflict between previous beliefs and the new information. People usually resolve this conflict by revising or reorganizing their previous beliefs to incorporate these new, striking pieces of information via the Piagetian (1964) process of accommodation or the mechanism of conceptual change (Chi, 2008), causing a shift in one’s views to a qualitatively different view of the issue than that previously held. Such a process is characterized in Ranney and Thagard’s (1988) Theory of Explanatory Coherence, which characterizes how people change their beliefs in ways driven by considerations of explanatory coherence and how belief networks are modified to maintain coherence with new information. According to the Theory of Explanatory Coherence’s Data Priority Principle, evidence that is critical, germane, repeatable, and credible carries maximal weight in our belief systems, indicating that numerical information can carry notable weight with respect to leading to accommodative belief revision (Ranney & Schank, 1998).

Such conceptual restructuring upon receiving new or surprising information is not necessarily a bad thing; indeed, it is what we characterize as learning, or what the Gestalt psychologist Wertheimer (1959) would term productive thinking—the process by which becoming aware of a gap or knowledge void prompts a person to increase global coherence amongst their beliefs. Perception of this knowledge void is attenuated by surprise—and thus, it is the most surprising numbers and stories that have the most potential to spawn considerable cognitive change and belief revision (Ranney & Clark, 2016). It has also been found that the more surprised people are by numbers, the less knowledgeable they report feeling about an issue, and thus, the more open they are to changing their beliefs in line with the number––a phenomenon known in the media as the establishing effect (Yarnall & Ranney, 2017). This is illustrated by the fact that participants who were surprised by the immigration rate in the 2001 experiment, for

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instance, were four times more likely to significantly change their positions on the issue than those participants who were less surprised (Ranney et al., 2001).

Defining Critical Thinking Numerical data, however, is most helpful when the data are reliable and accurate.

Importantly, media sources and elected officials can risk misinforming people with incorrect and/or misleading and unrepresentative data that are often not critically vetted by the press or the public itself. How, then, can we give people the tools to resist being misled by such deceptive statistics and figures? One possible avenue would be to encourage the development of critical thinking in the general populace. Critical thinking is often defined as a Gestalt-like process of learning through becoming aware of one’s own ignorance. Ranney and Schank (1998) extended this definition by hypothesizing that critical thinking means thinking more like a scientist and forming opinions using “scientific” as opposed to “plain old” reasoning (p. 1). With this kind of thinking, the reasoner employs more formal tools, such as deduction and alternative-hypothesis generation, and is more likely to vigilantly search for disconfirmation and be more selective about which new information to accommodate. Such scientific reasoning is considered to be more empirical, objective, rigorous, and accountable—and less emotional—than what is commonly understood by social reasoning.

An important component of such critical thinking and, some would argue, a distinguishing feature of it, is an awareness of the thought process itself—for instance, an awareness of how new information may fit with prior beliefs, and a conscious assessment of whether a statistic or figure offers strong evidence for what it is claiming. Such regulatory thought processes assessing the act of learning as it takes place are commonly defined in the education literature as metacognition—a necessary prerequisite for developing expertise in a subject (Sternberg, 1998). Metacognition has been shown to be fostered through several classroom techniques, such as encouraging students to brainstorm and generate their own responses, and to learn actively rather than simply being shown the right answer (Schoenfeld, 1987). Argumentation in the classroom is another way metacognition can be fostered, and it has been shown that students who articulate, interrelate, and revise their own arguments are more resistant to the biasing influences of extraneous information (Kuhn, Zillmer, Crowell, & Zavala, 2013).

Developing the Intervention My aim was to develop a short, text-based intervention that would promote critical thinking about statistics, drawing people’s attention to common aspects of uninformative and misleading statistics, and thus enabling them to more easily differentiate between misleading and representative statistics. To begin, we drew on a numeracy curriculum, developed and piloted for journalism students at University of California Berkeley by Michael Ranney and colleagues in 2008. This curriculum was created in response to the fact that journalists have a reported tendency to avoid backing up stories with relevant quantitative information. In one exercise in the curriculum’s Numbers, News and Evidence module, a fictional colleague called Pat offers a series of alleged statistics, one third of which are correct with the remaining two thirds being higher or lower than the

Velautham 116 true values. Journalism students exposed to the curriculum viewed Pat’s statistics increasingly critically the more that they were exposed to them, indicating that exposure to a mixed set of statistics in itself promotes increased skepticism with respect to quantitative information.

We extended this exercise for our training, providing a number of statistics that we asked participants to rate on a -4 to +4 scale, depending on how misleading, revealing, and/or pointless they found them. In some of the example statistics, we had a blank where the numerical portion of the statistic was, for example, __% as opposed to 42%, in order to ascertain whether this would have any effect on how the participants thought about and/or rated the statistic. In this, we were drawing on previous work of The Reasoning Group, which has suggested that the practice of Numerically-Driven Inferencing (i.e., being asked to estimate unknown quantities related to important policy issues before receiving the true values as feedback) fosters critical thinking (Munnich, Ranney, & Appel, 2004). Not seeing or being told the number directly means that participants have to go through the step of estimating what this quantity would be, activating a network of facts, set relationships, and causal beliefs about an issue. Such an activation mirrors the eliciting of prior knowledge in a classroom, where students are often encouraged to voice the misconceptions or prior beliefs about a subject that they bring with them (Hewson & Hewson, 1983). The justification behind this is that if students do not perceive a conflict between their prior knowledge and new information, they are more likely to simply assimilate the new information to form a flawed and inconsistent mental model.

However, when the learner perceives a conflict between new information and their prior beliefs, then the process of belief revision occurs, leading to conceptual change and productive learning. It is this process of active accommodation that we wished to activate in participants because it is through this process that people are most likely to critically assess the evidential quality of the new information. Another aspect of the training was providing the space for participants to self-explain or think aloud their ratings of the statistics. This was informed by research carried out by Chi, De Leeuw, Chiu, and LaVancher (1994) who showed that self-explaining leads to a deeper understanding of the material covered and to the improved acquisition of problem-solving skills.

Alongside example statistics to rate, we also gave participants textual instruction that drew explicit attention to potentially misleading and/or non-representative aspects of statistics, such as quantities lacking temporal or spatial breadth and quantities lacking measurement precision. We also encouraged participants to examine causality and the source of statistics—thus, encouraging the activation of mechanistic as well as numerical reasoning that we hope will lead people to more readily discount misleading or misrepresentative information.

The intervention was specifically designed to focus on building metacognitive and quantitative critical-reasoning skills—an aspect missing from the majority of college statistics curricula. Indeed, a study by Sorto (2006) found that only 1.3–2.6% of statistics curricula dealt explicitly with statistical reasoning (i.e., how to form inferences and generalize from statistics), with the majority having an overemphasis on the procedural, overtly mathematical end of statistics. Specifically, we wanted to steer away from mathematical training in this intervention, with the knowledge that for a large portion of the population, any form of explicit mathematical and/or scientific training is likely to

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generate high levels of fear and anxiety and have a knock-on effect on motivation, persistence, and even reasoning ability (Birenbaum & Eylath, 1994).

Conclusion The use of facts and figures in contemporary politics is a double-edged sword: On one hand, such numbers and statistics ground statements in a much-needed objective reality. However, on the other hand, the seeming authority of such numbers and statistics can be easily exploited. Indeed, the repeated references to shocking and misleading numerical information by journalists and policymakers has arguably led to an increased distrust of experts, facts, and data itself by the American public, and has thus heralded in an era of post-truth politics—a politics in which debates are conducted via highly emotive appeals rather than based on verifiable facts. All this has led to a reality where the truth is indistinguishable from fiction; a recent Stanford University survey showed that more than 80% of supposedly digital-savvy students could not tell the difference between a real news story and a fake piece of sponsored content (Donald, 2016).

The reality of having a president unconstrained by facts, together with a media polluted with fake and unverifiable clickbait, poses an urgent challenge for educators, particularly those of math and science. Our challenge is to equip students and the general population with the tools to question and refute outright lies while appreciating the value of facts, statistics, and verifiable truths in public debate. Testing the effectiveness of the intervention described above will shed light on the cognitive mechanisms that are at play when people engage with facts and statistics, and is thus a step in the right direction with respect to empowering future citizens to behave intelligently in an increasingly complex and uncertain future.

Author Biography Leela Velautham is currently a PhD student in the Education in Math, Science and Technology program at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include scientific and statistical literacy in the general public, and climate change mitigation through education- and psychology-based interventions.

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Velautham 118 Chi, M. T. H., De Leeuw, N., Chiu, M. H., & LaVancher, C. (1994). Eliciting selfexplanations improves understanding. Cognitive Science, 18(3), 439–477. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1803_3 Donald, B. (2016, November 22). Stanford researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online. Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Retrieved from https://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-find-students-havetrouble-judging-credibility-information-online Hewson, M. G., & Hewson, P. W. (1983). Effect of instruction using students’ prior knowledge and conceptual change strategies on science learning. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 20, 731–743. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.3660200804 Holan, A. D. (2016, December 13). 2016 lie of the year: Fake news. PolitiFact. Retrieved from http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/dec/13/2016-lie-year-fakenews/ Jacobson, L. (2016, November 3). Is Mike Pence right that 1 in 5 U.S. households don’t have anyone working? Politifact. Retrieved from http://www.politifact.com/truth-ometer/statements/2016/nov/03/mike-pence/mike-pence-right-1-5-us-householdsdont-have-anyon/ Kahan, D. M., Jenkins-Smith, H., & Braman, D. (2011). Cultural cognition of scientific consensus. Journal of Risk Research, 14(2), 147–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2010.511246 Kuhn, D., Zillmer, N., Crowell, A., & Zavala, J. (2013). Developing norms of argumentation: Metacognitive, epistemological, and social dimensions of developing argumentive competence. Cognition and Instruction, 31, 456–496. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2013.830618 Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979). Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(11), 2098–2109. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.37.11.2098 Munnich, E. L., Ranney, M. A., & Appel, D. M. (2004, January). Numerically-driven inferencing in instruction: The relatively broad transfer of estimation skills.

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Piaget, J. (1964). Part I: Cognitive development in children: Piaget development and learning. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2(3), 176–186. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.3660020306 Ranney, M., Cheng, F., Nelson, J., & Garcia de Osuna, J. (2001, November). Numerically driven inferencing: A new paradigm for examining judgments, decisions and policies involving base rates. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, Orlando, FL. Ranney, M., & Clark, D. (2016). Climate change conceptual change: Scientific information can transform attitudes. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8(1), 49–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12187 Ranney, M. A., Munnich, E. L., & Lamprey, L. N. (2016). Increased wisdom from the ashes of ignorance and surprise: Numerically-driven inferencing, global warming, and other exemplar realms. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 65, 129–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.plm.2016.03.005

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Designing and assessing numeracy training for journalists: Toward improving quantitative reasoning among media consumers. In P. A. Kirschner, F. Prins, V. Jonker, & G. Kanselaar (Eds.), International Perspectives in the Learning Sciences: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference for the Learning Sciences (Vol. 2, pp. 2-246–2-253). International Society for the Learning Sciences, Inc. Ranney, M., & Schank, P. (1998). Toward an integration of the social and the scientific: Observing, modeling, and promoting the explanatory coherence of reasoning. In S. Read & L. Miller (Eds.), Connectionist models of social reasoning and social behavior (pp. 245–274). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Ranney, M., & Thagard, P. (1988). Explanatory coherence and belief revision in naïve physics (Report No. UPITT/LRDC/ONR/APS-17). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Learning Research & Development Center. Retrieved from Defense Technical Information Center website: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA201093 Schoenfeld, A. H. (1987). What’s all the fuss about metacognition? In A. Schoenfeld (Ed.), Cognitive science and mathematics education (pp. 189–215). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Sorto, M. A. (2006). Identifying content knowledge for teaching statistics. In A. Rossman & B. Chance (Eds.), Working Cooperatively in Statistics Education: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Teaching Statistics (pp. 1–4). Retrieved from https://iase-web.org/documents/papers/icots7/C130.pdf Sternberg, R. J. (1998). Metacognition, abilities, and developing expertise: What makes an expert student? Instructional Science, 26(1–2), 127–140. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2243-8_12 Wang, A. B. (2016, November 16). ‘Post-truth’ named 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/post-truth-named2016-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries/?utm_term=.c9b26a04b4a1 Wertheimer, M. (1959). Productive thinking. New York, NY: Harper.

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For Girls Made of Fire Eleni Eftychiou1 Millikan High School, Long Beach, California

i burn. i am a small hill of twigs so carefully carved into the shape of flesh and bone. cut away the unwanted parts of me and you are left with my complicity and eagerness to please. so instead of your knife, i take your matches. i would rather light a fire on my own skin and turn my protest to ashes than be sorted into sweet and bitter until i am nothing but doll eyes and nail polish. i burn. i am raging and i scorch smirks off of lips and 1

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Eleni Eftychiou. Email: eleni.eftychiou@gmail.com.

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watches off of wrists and satin ties from corn-starch collars. i burn for the angry girls, the broken girls, the hopeless, scraped-up, restless girls. i burn for the tired girls, the not-enough-or-too-much girls, the sick-of-always-running-girls, the i-am-smarter-than-you-girls, the they-never-ever-listen girls. i am a small hill of twigs they tried to turn to paper. but i will not carry their stories on my back. i sear my own into gravel and rock. i burn and my arms are worth every sunrise and my bloody knees worth the stars and i am light. i burn and i do not let them decide for how far or how long or how tall my flames reach. i burn with red as my fury and orange as my hope. i burn and we burn until someone brings the water.

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Author’s Note I wrote this poem two days after the election. For me, a Trump victory was a symbol of our failure as a country, not only to educate ourselves on policy, but also to educate ourselves on others’ experiences. I remember the election-night headline on the CNN website, printed big in all caps, “IT’S TRUMP,” and the sinking feeling that I had grown all too familiar with during the campaign season struck me once again. I do not think it was naive of me to expect better from our country; I had faith in the goodwill of the people and faith that we are selfless enough to sacrifice our own wants for others’ needs.

The election of Donald Trump was an anomaly, and it did not spring from the inherent kindness in every human heart. This man’s campaign was fueled by misplaced anger, fear, ignorance, and intolerance, and it appealed to the people whose lives were also fueled by these. During the next four––possibly eight––years, it will be hard to keep hope at the forefront of our activism. Personally, I have struggled to have hope when fear seems so much more convenient; it’s easier to yell and scream than to have a diplomatic discussion––just ask any toddler. However, hope is what separates us from the very people who frustrate us. We have hope for a better future, and we still see the world through a lens of what it could be. Our values of acceptance and compassion glow brighter than any kind of hate that could try to put them out. For me, the most important thing is to keep a Trump presidency from being normalized. This is not something that should have happened to a country whose goal is to keep moving forward. Undoubtedly, this was more than a couple steps back in history for us. It is especially disappointing because just one bigot in the White House can erase all that hard work. Still, I remain confident that we will be able to recover.

This poem was not so much inspired by Trump as it was by his supporters: the bullies who try to make others look small to make themselves look big. But I refuse to be small, I refuse to be silenced, and I refuse to let anybody else who stands for justice be silenced.

Although I am hopeful, I am still angry, and my anger will not cease until it is given a reason.

Author Biography Eleni Eftychiou is 16 years old and an 11th grader at Millikan High School in Long Beach, California. She was born and raised in Long Beach, where she also attended Cubberley K–8 School. She was editor of Cubberley’s creative writing magazine, and she completed the South Basin Writing Project, a summer program at California State University, Long Beach. At Millikan, she is enrolled in the QUEST Pathway, an honors and college-prep program, and is Co-president of Millikan’s Feminist Club. Her interests include photography, French, psychology, politics, and government. At home, she shares a room with her sister, Zoe, and occasionally a cat named Bessie.

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Contextualizing Trump: Education for Communism Curry Malott1 West Chester University

Abstract In this article, Dr. Malott challenges the conclusion that the primary factor that led to Trump’s victory in the 2016 United States presidential election was the racism of poor whites.

Rejecting this position for its capitulation to bourgeois caricatures of segments of the working class, Malott points to the fall of communism for a more historically contextualized understanding of how we got to where we are. That is, this essay notes that the rise of the socialist bloc after World War II was so inspiring to the world’s oppressed and colonized that it slowed down capitalism’s tendency toward an extending rate of exploitation. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, and an aggressive anti-communist campaign, capitalists unleashed a more aggressive capitalism called neoliberalism. After nearly five decades of neoliberal wealth redistribution, and the destruction of the communist movement, right-wing demagogy has risen in European country after European country. Meanwhile, the white middle class—like other segments of the work force—has experienced significant downward mobility and is therefore desperate for economic relief. Because the white middle class tends to see their interests as the same as the capitalist class compared to those of the white working class, this group of more privileged and pampered workers—as has been the case historically—is increasingly susceptible to racist and fascist ideology. It was within this context that Trump and the so-called alt-right (i.e., neofascists and neo-Nazis) gained marginal influence, which is quickly eroding evidenced by Trump's falling approval rating. As a response to Trump, neofascism, and capitalism more generally, this essay argues for a communist education and the organization of the party form.

Contextualizing Trump: Education for Communism On November 8, 2016, as the election for the 45th president of the United States got underway, many pollsters had Hillary Clinton barely ahead in the key states needed to secure 270 Electoral College votes. However, major media outlets interpreted this slight lead as an indicator of extreme confidence, giving Clinton an 80% chance of beating Trump. Given that Trump’s campaign was marked by consistently racist, Islamophobic, misogynistic, and violent language, these numbers—to a wide swath of the political spectrum, despite the evidence—seemed accurate. However, by around 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, wishful thinking gave way to facts as Trump’s victory began to appear inevitable. Hours after midnight, Donald Trump was officially declared the presidentelect.

Interpreting the result as a major political upset by the most unpopular candidate in U.S. history, a candidate associated with neo-fascist rhetoric, millions of progressive people—convinced that so-called “love” would “trump hate,”—were, among other things, shocked, saddened, scared, and enraged. So many people, horrified by the fact that a 1

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Curry Malott, PhD. Email: CMalott@wcupa.edu.

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sexist, racist, Muslim-hating, bigoted, capitalist would soon be taking the White House, desperately wanted to know what had happened. Before turning to the debate around why Trump won, I will pause for a moment and address the issue of fascism.

Is this Fascism?

One of the most visible signs that emerged within the crowd of protestors who came to the Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition’s “Inaugurate the Resistance” demonstration at the January 20th presidential inauguration of Donald Trump simply read “FASCISM.” The black-and-white fascism sign, broken up into three roughly two-foot-by-three-foot sections, would receive thunderous cheers from thousands of protestors when raised. But does the election of Donald Trump signal the emergence of fascism in the United States? This is a hasty conclusion with potentially dangerous consequences (Party for Socialism and Liberation, 2016).

Fascism is simply the capitalist class’ last resort to control or regain control of the bourgeois state and the working class when bourgeois, democratic channels no longer function in that capacity. Through the anti-communist demagogy of fascist rhetoric, the capitalist class “sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of demoralized lumpenproletariat—all the countless human beings whom finance capital has brought to desperation and frenzy” (Trotsky, 1996, p. 9). After employing all manner of fascist terrorism and civil war, “finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive, administrative, and educational powers of the state” (p. 9). For Trotsky, the emergence of fascism does not just mean that bourgeois democratic governance is eradicated, but that “workers organizations are annihilated” (p. 10).

Based on Trotsky’s definition of fascism, it is clear that the United States is not yet fascist. That is, although they may be waning in influence, democratic systems of bourgeois governance are still functioning as an effective form of social control. Trotsky (1996) points to an important danger in prematurely announcing the arrival of fascism: “To insist that fascism is already here, or to deny the very possibility of its coming to power, amounts politically to one and the same thing” (p. 15). Pointing toward the extreme importance of rebuilding the communist movement in the current period of mass mobilization, Trotsky, referring to Germany, offers an important clarification: If the Communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counterrevolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie. Precisely in this sphere the election revealed the opposite picture: counterrevolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat. (p. 18) Hoards of White Racists?

While not directly invoking the notion of fascism, a common explanation for why Trump won the 2016 election offered by the (neo)liberal media is that hoards of uneducated, ignorant, racist, poor whites festering in the rural United States successfully

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voted for their preferred racist candidate. Ignored in this story is the fact that much of the white working class who voted for Trump also voted for Obama in 2012 (and 2008).

Although there is no doubt that institutional racism continues to function in the U.S., and that white racism certainly played some role in the election of Trump, it does not automatically follow that racism was the only or the most determinate factor that led to Trump’s victory. So what is a more plausible explanation?

The first indicator is the fact that nearly all of the precincts that flipped from Democrat to Republican were economically more depressed in 2016 compared to 2012.

In an interview with Liberation News (Bergsten, 2017), Noah Carmichael, Secretary/Treasurer of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local no. 7 in Akron, Ohio, reflected on his perception of why some workers voted for Trump in these deindustrialized, drug-ridden areas: Trump resonated with a lot of working people even if they don’t really believe that U.S. manufacturing is coming back. . . . Everybody understands that the bridges and roads are falling apart and that there’s work to be done here. We could also convert to green energy and create jobs that way, and Trump is clearly not moving in that direction. I think that part of his message resonated with some people, in that there is work to be done and they thought he could help them do it.

I think that’s where they saw a lot of the hope, even if it was hope with not very much confidence. (p. 2) Beyond the skeptical hope that Trump could help put people to work, another factor helping to explain why Clinton lost in 2016 is that nearly seven million registered Democrats who voted in 2012 stayed home in 2016. One explanation for this is that millions of people of color, who have historically voted Democrat, chose to stay home rather than vote Democrat. Why? If the rate of poverty and state-sponsored terrorism continued to increase under the country’s first African American president, then what could be expected from Hillary Clinton with her war crimes; the combined effect of her comments referring to African American youth as “super predators” and Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which has been harshly critiqued for negatively impacting African American communities; and the Clintons’ record of advancing neoliberal economic policies? Consequently, voter turnout for the 2016 election was exceptionally low (Party for Socialism and Liberation, 2016).

Low voter turnout is an indictor of political and economic alienation. That is, the most impoverished and oppressed communities within capitalism tend to consistently have the lowest voter turnout. Experience teaches non-capitalists, especially the most exploited or neglected, that no election will ever really change their lives. This low voter turnout should not be confused with cynicism or hopelessness. Rather, it is evidence of understanding about whose interests the bourgeois state is designed to serve. At the other end of the voting spectrum is socialist Cuba, where consistently close to 100% of voters turn out, reflecting the low levels of alienation indicative of labor-controlled, workers’ states (La Riva, 2015).

Trump’s win therefore points to the economic and political alienation that kept millions of people at home and the economic desperation that led others, mostly whites, to take a chance on Trump’s promise of bringing back jobs (despite, perhaps, his bigotry).

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However, in the unlikely event that Trump succeeds in transferring manufacturing jobs from China or Mexico (for example) to the U.S., the average U.S. wage—far higher than in current centers of manufacturing (e.g., China)—would be transferred to consumers, thereby leading to a huge spike in the cost of commodities and a deepening crisis of realization (Wolff, 2016). However, a more important and influential factor that Trump does not identify in understanding the redundancy of growing segments of the working class is the development of labor-saving technologies (e.g., automation). Laborsaving technologies, in this stage in their long development, especially since the mid-19th century, have replaced thousands of workers with robots and other computerized devises.

Although it might appear on the surface that labor-saving technologies would result in massive, unimpeded increases in profit margins since they reduce labor costs, in reality they lead to the falling rate of profit. That is, if new value can only be created by exploiting human labor, then the goal of the capitalist is to put as many labor hours into motion simultaneously as possible. To make up for reductions in the number of labor hours set in motion as a result of labor-saving technologies, the capitalist employs counteracting measures, such as speeding up machines, reducing the hourly wage rate, extending the length of the workday, and seeking out more exploitable sources of labor in other markets. In other words, labor-saving technology leads to the further immiseration and enslavement of the working class. However, under a socialist economy driven not by exchange value, but by the satisfaction of need, labor-saving technologies can do what they intuitively seem like they could do—reduce the length of the workday and lesson the burden of social reproduction. Solutions to today’s deepening economic crisis therefore point beyond capitalism and therefore beyond the U.S. presidency.

What Does NAFTA Have to Do With It? Clinton’s inability to beat the least favorable candidate in U.S. history represents a referendum on neoliberal capitalism and a repudiation of the Democratic Party for joining the Republican Party and the capitalist class in a bipartisan assault against the working class. Among the many other anti-worker, neoliberal actions, the Clintons were behind the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signing, thereby further capitulating to the dictates of Wall Street.

NAFTA, among other things, allowed U.S. manufacturing corporations to transfer their production to Mexico. There, they have exploited a more depressed and devalued labor market and then brought their products back across the border into the U.S. without paying tariffs. In the process, many U.S. labor unions have lost their leverage in holding back capital’s incessant drive to increase the rate of exploitation. That is, the threat of a strike lost much of its strength when more vulnerable sources of super-exploitable labor were brought into the fold.

NAFTA therefore leveled a major blow to U.S. labor unions and lowered the standard of living for workers on both sides of the border. Because NAFTA is a treaty designed to redistribute wealth from workers to capitalists through deregulation, it is part of capitalism’s neoliberal turn. This neoliberal assault on workers, from capital’s perspective, became less risky after the demise of the communist movement. Communist labor organizing demonstrated to the global working class how the contradictions of capitalism could be resolved. With the demise of the workers’ movement, capital has

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been able to super-exploit labor, pushing the wage far below what is socially necessary (i.e., below subsistence wages).

In essence, neoliberalism should be understood as a way to increase profit margins while simultaneously disciplining labor. Further, neoliberalism has privatized public services and offered corporations massive tax breaks and welfare thereby, yet again, redistributing wealth upward. Consequently, the capitalist class is as wealthy as they have ever been, while those who rely on a wage to survive are increasingly impoverished.

Therefore, one of the factors that led to Trump’s victory is that, on his campaign trail, he consistently argued against NAFTA. Consequently, Trump represented, if only rhetorically and theatrically, a change, or something other than the status quo. That Trump has had any appeal at all among the working class is likely due to the poverty and suffering that only continued to escalate during Obama’s administration.

Neoliberal capitalism’s disciplining of the labor movement, especially within imperialist countries like the U.S., is part of a larger capitalist-class counter-offensive against the global working class, workers’ states, and the global movement for communism. The history of this anti-communist, counter-offensive represents the larger context in which I will now situate Trump’s victory.

The Historical Context If Trump won the election because his campaign, compared to Clinton’s, was more capable of offering white workers the kind of protectionist rhetoric that speaks to a whitenationalistic chauvinism embedded in the promise of a brighter economic future, the question is: Why? Specifically, I am less concerned with why Trump was more able to offer an appealing line than Clinton than with why that line was appealing in the first place.

Searching for an answer, I refuse to settle for explanations, as presented by some, that suggest that white workers are just backward and racist. I also find theories of whiteness as a political system in itself that exists for the sole purpose of benefitting white people to be inadequate. These types of narratives tend to be decontextualized and of little use in understanding how we got to where we are. A more useful explanation can be found within the history of the war against communism.

Although earlier manifestations of imperialism’s anti-communism are important and could be pointed to, it was not until after World War II that the competing imperialist countries acknowledged that their deadly, self-destructive feuds had nearly destroyed capitalism. Consequently, they agreed to settle their differences and unite their forces against the global proletarian class camp, of which the center of gravity was the Soviet Union. In this context, the so-called Cold War was not a struggle between countries, but rather a struggle between classes. On one hand, you have the capitalist class and the imperialist countries. On the other, you have the worlds’ workers’ states and the working classes within the imperialist countries.

Communism’s threat to imperialist hegemony stems from its ideological foundation, which is internationalism and, thus, its anti-racism. With the communist movement playing a major role in global affairs by the end of World War II, a form of collective, class-conscious subjectivity existed as a counterweight to capitalism’s competitive, individualist subjectivity. Only a united working class organized through the party could

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defeat bourgeois rule and allow the transformation of capitalist production relations into socialist ones. The communist movement therefore challenged “American workers” to reject the conception of self that positioned them as being in competition with each other and with workers in other nations.

The progressive working class movement, even within the centers of imperialist power such as the U.S., was influenced by communism’s notion of collective struggle and commonness against (for a theoretical elaboration of commonness against see Ford, 2016). By the 1940s, the Communist Party USA had over 100,000 members, significantly influencing the country’s political atmosphere. For example, the influence of communism was apparent within the reformist progressive education movement of the 1930s.

Progressive education was focused on collective struggle and community solutions, as opposed to the corporate-endorsed social-efficiency model of education that reasserted capital’s individualistic form of subjectivity.

After being forcefully subverted and undermined by McCarthy and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the 1950s, the communist movement all but vanished in the U.S. However, with a new economic crisis gripping the world economy, the socialist movement reemerged in the U.S. in the 1960s, led by the Black Panther Party.

Again, the federal government, this time through the FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), sabotaged the movement through propaganda, political assassinations, agent provocateurs, imprisonment, and so on.

As a result of the success of the war against the workers’ movement, capitalists could push harder than ever before to squeeze as much value out of workers, exceeding all natural limits. This has been possible because of the absence of a communist counterweight. Today, after decades of the forceful absence of communism, the U.S. left tends to be driven by liberal notions of individual freedom and identity recognition. It is within this context that Trump’s ideological line has been forged, which has been confused for fascism due, in part, to its anti-communist and generally bigoted rhetoric.

Although the mainstream of the reformist left is able to challenge Trump’s racism and Islamophobia, for example, it is less able to respond to his nationalism, protectionism, and pseudo-economic proposals, leading to incorrectly naming it fascist.

With no large-scale, progressive workers’ movement to offer an increasingly impoverished, imprisoned, and enlisted working class a viable socialist solution to capitalism, the far right is poised to rise to power. If traditional political forms of social control fail, fascism will become a real threat. The solution, I maintain, continues to be a mass socialist movement organized through a party form that is militant enough to oppose Trump and everything he tries to do, and sharp and flexible enough to offer a vision and strategy for moving toward socialism in a constantly changing global situation.

Educating for Communism Challenging Trump, the racist, capitalist system that he is a product of, and the bourgeois state more generally, requires educating for communism. Such an education must include a deep understanding of the history of anti-communism. Analysis reveals that what remains of the U.S. left has largely abandoned a class analysis and turned its back on itself, the proletarian class camp. The left subsequently adopted a politics of identity, focused on identity recognition in place of the working class’ historical goal of

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seizing state power and replacing the bourgeois state with a temporary proletarian state.

Re-embracing a class analysis requires going deeper than racially mediated consumption patterns and other consequences of capitalism.

Yet being aware of the consequences of capitalism does not automatically lead to a systematic understanding of capitalism or an awareness of its counter-intuitive internal logic. Consciousness that capitalism exploits people, thereby creating poverty, also does not foster awareness that capitalist ideology produces subjectivity in ways that help normalize capitalism as natural and even inevitable. But subjectivity, while driven by capital, is also vulnerable to subversion (Ford, 2016). An education for communism must contribute to this subversion.

Because of the constantly changing global situation, Ford (2016) argues that a communist education must not only emphasize learning, which is characterized by predetermined outcomes, but it must foster a more creative and open-ended form of studying. However, Ford is clear that effectively organizing against any system is not a matter of pure, unrestrained experimentation, but rather requires fostering a deep understanding of it and closely following its development.

The Instability of Capitalism At the same time, I dismiss the conception of Trump as somehow unusual or more savage than normal capitalism. We must be in solidarity with progressive peoples’ legitimate fear of the instability a Trump presidency is bringing—fear of mass deportation, hate crimes, sexual violence, heightened restrictions on civil liberties, and more. Even though Obama deported more immigrants than any other president in U.S. history, for example, the bigotry being unleashed by Trump should not be dismissed.

However, it is also important to challenge the conclusion that Clinton would have equaled stability because Trump equals instability. Domestically, for example, the dramatic spike in white supremacist hate crimes immediately following the election offers substantial concrete evidence to support the conclusion that Trump’s victory represents a win for the extreme right and a surge in instability. The white supremacist groups emboldened by Trump’s victory and the far-right-wing cabinet members he is appointing are certainly a major concern and will have to be resisted at every turn during his presidency. The fallacy of the assumption that Clinton would have equaled stability because Trump equals instability stems from two primary requirements of the system of imperialist capitalism, regardless of who is the president of its leading country, the U.S.: endless war and an extending rate of exploitation. The correct conclusion, therefore, is that, as long as imperialist capitalism exists, the vast majority of humanity will be subjected to instability and violence. Trump must no doubt be resisted; however, the solution is not a more progressive imperialist figurehead, but the complete destruction of imperialism.

Author Biography Curry Malott is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations in the College of Education at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Malott earned a PhD in 2004 from New Mexico State University in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in the Social Studies, under the guidance of Dr. Marc Pruyn. Most recently, Dr. Malott is

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the author of History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War (2016) and with Derek R. Ford, Marx, Capital and Education: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Becoming (2015). Dr. Malott is also a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

References Bergsten, J. D. (2017, June 26). Interview: Socialism, organized labor, and working class Ohio. Liberation Newspaper for the Party of Socialism and Liberation. Retrieved from https://www.liberationnews.org/socialism-organized-labor-and-working-classohio/ Ford, D. R. (2016). Communist study: Education for the commons. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

La Riva, G. (2015, July 1). Cuba’s state in revolution. Liberation Newspaper for the Party of Socialism and Liberation. Retrieved from https://www.liberationnews.org/cubas-state-revolution/ Party for Socialism and Liberation. (2016, November 9). United States of Trump? The fight back begins. Liberation Newspaper for the Party of Socialism and Liberation.

Retrieved from https://www.liberationnews.org/united-states-of-trump-whats-atstake-the-fight-back-begins/ Trotsky, L. (1996). Fascism: What it is and how to fight it. New York, NY: Pathfinder.

Wolff, R. D. (2016, November 11). Economic update: Trump explained. Truthout.

Retrieved from http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38346-economic-update-trumpexplained

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Curbing Ignorance and Apathy (Across the Political Spectrum) Through Global Citizenship Education Michael Thier1 University of Oregon

What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?

I don’t know, and I don’t care.

—Jimmy Buffett Whether we know that snarky response as a Jimmy Buffett lyric or the punchline to a quintessential dad joke, “I don’t know, and I don’t care” captures the disunity that defines the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We know or care very little about our ideological mirrors to the extent that the “United” States, our voting patterns, and our reactions to them have become a curiosity for the other 95% of the world’s population.

Our new national pastime of navel-gazing about an election that many pundits call inexplicable follows a campaign filled with rancorous rhetoric that revealed globalization as a springboard for the social unease that propelled Donald Trump into the Oval Office.

Many voters chose their candidate based on perceptions of his business bona fides.

Those voters either did not know or did not care that multiple bankruptcies do not align with such perceptions. Many voters used their ballots in protest, seeking an outsider whose expertise came from beyond the Capital Beltway. Those voters either did not know or did not care that public policy experience often predicts one’s ability to govern.

Disheartened members of the political left continue to reproach the president and his supporters for what they see as a barrage of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and Islamophobia. But Trump opponents either do not know or do not care that packaging all 46% of the electorate as racists, misogynists, xenophobes, homophobes, and Islamophobes is inherently misguided. Instead, Pehme (2016) counsels crestfallen liberals to engage right-leaning family members around the dinner table, suggesting that despite “a depressing number of them that deserve these characterizations, to brush aside the more than 61 million Americans who cast their ballots for Trump as mere hateful idiots is to perpetuate the liberal elitism that helped fuel Trump’s success” (para. 11).

Regardless of what your 2016 ballot looked like, choosing to neither know nor care about the perspectives of nearly half your country’s citizens exhausts any chance to win the hearts and minds of your ideological mirrors. Ideas lose transferability, if not meaning, once we squander opportunities for dialogue. As someone who has cast votes

1

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Michael Thier, University of Oregon, Department of Educational Methodology, Policy, and Leadership; 5267 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 97403. Email: mthier@uoregon.edu.

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Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 133–139

134 Thier for both major U.S. political parties, but who also counts himself among those who believe that two people can disagree while both being right, I recommend that we stop wringing our hands and cease asking how our country could have elected a reality TV personality with a professor-emeritus-length CV of un-presidential behaviors. Instead, as the Serenity Prayer instructs, we must “accept the things [we] cannot change,” summon the “courage to change the things we can,” and find the “wisdom to know the difference” (Niebuhr, 1943). Taking the latter tack, we should begin by accepting that no one wins minds by calling others ignorant. No one wins hearts by calling others cold. Instead, we must examine something that nearly none of our public schools taught us to know or care about: global citizenship education (GCE). Summoning the courage to change the things we can, I propose we emphasize GCE, a concept that too many education decisionmakers overlook regardless of their political persuasion.

In a world beset by the opportunities and challenges of globalization, GCE can instill the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and dispositions to live, learn, and work. In one of many global citizenship conceptualizations, Oxley and Morris (2013) present four cosmopolitan dimensions––political, moral, economic, and cultural––and four advocacy dimensions–– critical, social, environmental, and spiritual. With so many dimensions to navigate, one might readily recognize why GCE can prompt students’ critical thinking about the world they inhabit (Henderson, Nunez-Rodriguez, & Casari, 2011; Maguire, Donovan, Mishook, de Gaillande, & Garcia, 2012). Given climate change, wealth inequality, permeable borders, and complex geopolitical conflicts, it seems logical that GCE would be offered as a public-school standard. Unfortunately, though, the travesty of inequitable opportunities to learn relegates GCE to boutique status. By one measure, less than 1.5% of U.S. public schools offer GCE to their K–12 students (Thier, 2016). Even in the rare places that offer GCE, access favors students who are university-bound, white, and from affluent backgrounds (Perna et al., 2013). Several additional challenges thwart efforts to scale up GCE: Its literature base is diffuse (Marshall, 2011), its definitions remain hotly contested (Davies, 2006; Myers, 2016), and empirical studies are rare (Kerkhoff, 2016).

Still, this burgeoning area of interdisciplinary research and practice links GCE to several desirable outcomes, such as increasing empathy within and across cultures, as well as fostering engagement with and understanding of complex international affairs (Goren & Yemini, 2017).

Since Election Day 2016, pundits have clutched at myriad factors in their attempts to explain results. Some have zeroed in on a core component of GCE: attitudes toward globalization (e.g., Lakshmanan, 2016). Many Americans’ exceptionally tepid attitudes toward the rest of the world are not surprising given the bubble our nationally focused schools have propagated. After World War II claimed the lives of as many as 85 million humans, or about 4% of the world’s population at the time, many policymakers and educators pleaded for U.S. education to globalize students’ experiences (Scott, 2005).

Instead, policies continue to compel elementary and secondary educators to address a narrow range of curricular goals, typically those that can be tested easily, such as basic skills in literacy and numeracy (Zhao, 2015). Focusing on local and national priorities, our secondary schools do not mandate that students learn about the world. Students simply do not receive the type of intentional GCE that would help them gain critical selfawareness, mutual respect, and a sense of reciprocity (Dolby, 2008), all of which are

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traits that would be beneficial if distributed widely across our electorate and our society at large.

For example, the Education Commission of the States (2007) compiled graduation requirement data for all 50 states and Washington, DC. Less than half of those 51 jurisdictions required students to take as much as a half unit of globally focused social studies coursework (e.g., world geography, world history, or even European history).

Only eight jurisdictions required students to spend one or more years learning a language other than English. Only three jurisdictions—Michigan, Washington, DC, and West Virginia—required students to do both. By contrast, nearly all students were compelled to take three or more years of English, mathematics, and science each. With such little priority accorded to curriculum with explicitly global themes, one could imagine how infrequently schools might integrate GCE across various curricula ranging from the humanities to the sciences, an approach that Heilman (2008) casts as a remedy for a “single-nation curriculum” (p. 30).

Some readers might wonder what, if any, are the costs to our domestic focus. As one seemingly innocuous example, we join Burma and Liberia as the only three countries on the planet that do not use the metric system, denying us the ability to collaborate seamlessly in a common language of measurement with nearly 200 other countries. Of greater severity, perhaps the kinds of global perspectives that one could develop through intentional, well-integrated GCE would have helped the electorate think deeply about the ramifications of nationalist agendas, of the economic variety or otherwise. Sadly, the world is witnessing a rising tide of nationalism. The Economist (“Trump’s World,” 2016) likened the U.S. Republican Party’s gravitation toward nationalism to the rise of alternative populist parties in Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs), France (Front National), Germany (Alternative für Deutschland), Hungary (Fidesz – Magyar Polgári Szövetség), India (Bharatiya Janata Party), the Netherlands (Partij voor de Vrijheid), Poland (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), Sweden (Sverigedemokraterna), and Turkey (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi). These parties all reject globalization, refugees, and immigrants, particularly those who are Muslim. Given the U.S. history of an inward-facing educational agenda (Gaudelli & Fernekes, 2004), we must abandon the practice of disregarding our globalizing world.

Inside the bubble of our U.S.-first educational system, we learn to know and care very little about the rest of the world (Rapoport, 2009; Summit, 2013). Surrounded by 3,000 miles of ocean on either side, our historic bouts of isolationism align well with our recent potential to reignite that practice. But if we want education to be a mechanism that mitigates ignorance and apathy for future generations of American voters (both the half that goes to the polls in a presidential year and the half that does not2), we must embrace GCE in K–12 classrooms. GCE can pierce the bubbles that interfere with our knowing or caring about the diversity that our communities, country, and world display.

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Trump (“Text of President Trump,” 2017) called education the “civil rights issue of our time.” Among several unspecified aspects of that claim, I wonder what U.S. education will do to make our citizens civil toward one another. To what extent will education lead students to approach

2

Presidential year voter turnout in the U.S. has fluctuated 49–58% since 1964.

136 Thier each other with humility and mutual responsibility, regardless of how their counterparts look, how they choose to pray or not, the language(s) they speak, their national affiliation(s), or any other demographic separators that would be better pitched as catalysts of intellectual curiosity? By allegedly putting American citizens first, Trump’s aim to rediscover some nebulous moment of greatness is intellectually suspect, if not dishonest. In fact, GCE would lead to a greater society, one in which citizens possess global views that make them less inclined to endorse border wars, trade wars, or wars of any kind.

As exit-polling data in Table 1 show, perceptions about globalization were powerful drivers in the 2016 U.S. presidential election results. Voters who cared most about foreign policy or the economy—issues that are often framed to require examinations of forces outside the country—opted for Clinton. Voters who cared most about terrorism and immigration—issues that are often framed to generate protectionist or isolationist sentiments—endorsed Trump. Voters who viewed international trade as a job producer or as job neutral endorsed one candidate. Voters who viewed international trade as a job robber endorsed another. Overwhelmingly, anti-immigrant sentiments guided a considerable segment of the electorate. In the wake of the June 2016 U.K. Brexit vote, University of Oxford sociologist Alexander Betts made similar observations during the TEDSummit (McManus, 2016). Betts argued that political lines no longer divide as right and left, as tax and spend. Instead, an unexamined fault line divides “those that embrace globalization and those that fear globalization” (para. 4).

Table 1 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Exit Polling Data by Percentage Polling Item

Trump

Most important issue: Foreign policy

60

34

Most important issue: Economy

52

42

Most important issue: Terrorism

39

57

Most important issue: Immigration

32

64

Trade with other countries: Creates jobs

59

35

Trade with other countries: Does not affect jobs

54

39

Trade with other countries: Costs jobs

31

65

Handling illegal immigrants working in U.S.: Deportation

14

84

Support building wall along U.S.-Mexico border

10

86

Note. Data from Huang, Jacoby, Strickland, and Lai (2016).

Clinton

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To unite this divide in our age of truthiness, all students need GCE––an education that defines success using metrics other than standardized tests of basic literacy and numeracy skills. Schools should not be judged by their ability to place students on conveyor belts that move them through a requisite number of Carnegie units. Instead, success should produce active citizens who know how to sift through a universe of information to dissect sense from nonsense, a core experience of GCE. Success should mean graduates who engage in transformative, purposive action in their local communities and the wider world, so they can combat intolerance (Bajaj, 2011; Catalano, 2013; Woolley, 2008). At a minimum, successful graduates should be discerning voters who recognize that neither CNN, nor Fox News, nor the Daily Kos, nor Breitbart is painting a comprehensive picture of their community, country, or world. As Thomas Friedman, who made globalization a household word through his book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, notes in a 2010 op-ed, “When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues” (para. 10). Until we embrace education models that align with GCE, too large a swath of our electorate will remain ill-equipped to know or care. As long as we fail in that regard, we will get the leadership that we deserve.

Author Biography Michael Thier, a research associate jointly appointed to the Educational Policy Improvement Center and the Center for Equity Promotion at the University of Oregon, is a candidate for a concurrent PhD (in Educational Leadership, with specialization in quantitative research methods) and MPA. He collaborates with researchers in 10 countries on mixed-methods studies that focus on (a) global citizenship education and (b) opportunities and challenges for students in rural and remote schools. His previous degrees come from New York University (BA in Journalism) and Stony Brook University (MAT in English). Most importantly, he is the proud father of two daughters.

References Bajaj, M. (2011). Human rights education: Ideology, location, and approaches. Human Rights Quarterly, 33, 481–508. https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2011.0019 Catalano, T. A. (2013). Occupy: A case illustration of social movements in global citizenship education. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 8(3), 276–288. https://doi.org/10.1177/1746197913497661 Davies, L. (2006). Global citizenship: Abstraction or framework for action? Educational Review, 58, 5–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131910500352523 Dolby, N. (2008). Global citizenship and study abroad: A comparative study of American and Australian undergraduates. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 17, 51–67.

Education Commission of the States. (2007). Standard high school graduation requirements (50-state). Retrieved from http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/mbprofall?Rep=HS01

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Friedman, T. L. (2010, November 16). Too good to check. The New York Times.

Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17friedman.html Gaudelli, W., & Fernekes, W. R. (2004). Teaching about global human rights for global citizenship. The Social Studies, 95, 16–26. https://doi.org/10.3200/tsss.95.1.16-26 Goren, H., & Yemini, M. (2017). Global citizenship education redefined–A systematic review of empirical studies on global citizenship education. International Journal of Educational Research, 82, 170–183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2017.02.004 Heilman, E. E. (2008). Including voices from the world through global citizenship education. Social Studies and the Young Learner, 20(4), 30–33.

Henderson, F., Nunez-Rodriguez, N., & Casari, W. (2011). Enhancing research skills and information literacy in community college science students. The American Biology Teacher, 73(5), 270–275. https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2011.73.5.5 Huang, J., Jacoby, S., Strickland, M., & Lai, K. K. R. (2016, November 8). Election 2016: Exit polls. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html Kerkhoff, S. N. (2016). Designing global futures: A mixed methods study to develop and validate the Teaching for Global Readiness Scale. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/handle/1840.16/11104 Lakshmanan, I. A. R. (2016, November 11). Trump won. Globalization lost. Now what?

The Boston Globe. Retrieved from https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/columns/2016/11/10/trump-wonglobalization-lost-now-what/b1qHh9uprJUd6AbVMwIHWN/story.html Maguire, C., Donovan, C., Mishook, J., Gaillande, G. D., & Garcia, I. (2012). Choosing a life one has reason to value: The role of the arts in fostering capability development in four small urban high schools. Cambridge Journal of Education, 42, 367–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764x.2012.706258 Marshall, H. (2011). Instrumentalism, ideals and imaginaries: Theorising the contested space of global citizenship education in schools. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9, 411–426. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2011.605325 McManus, E. (2016, June 29). I am British: Alexander Betts at TEDSummit [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://blog.ted.com/i-am-british-alexander-betts-at-tedsummit/ Myers, J. P. (2016). Charting a democratic course for global citizenship education: Research directions and current challenges. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 24(55), 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.24.2174 Niebuhr, R. (1943). The serenity prayer. Bulletin of the Federal Council of Churches.

Oxley, L., & Morris, P. (2013). Global citizenship: A typology for distinguishing its multiple conceptions. British Journal of Educational Studies, 61(3), 301–325. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2013.798393

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Pehme, M. (2016, November 23). C’mon, liberals, give your Trump-voting relatives some love on Thanksgiving: Just because they voted for Trump doesn’t mean they’re awful people. Really. So talk to them. The Daily Beast. Retrieved from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/23/c-mon-liberals-give-your-trumpvoting-relatives-some-love-on-thanksgiving.html Perna, L. W., May, H., Yee, A., Ransom, T., Rodriguez, A., & Fester, R. (2013). Unequal access to rigorous high school curricula: An exploration of the opportunity to benefit from the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. Educational Policy, 29(2), 402–425. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904813492383 Rapoport, A. (2009). Lonely business or mutual concern: The role of comparative education in the cosmopolitan citizenship debates. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 12, 23–32.

Scott, R. A. (2005). Many calls, little action: Global illiteracy in the United States. Language Problems and Language Planning, 29, 67–82. https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.29.1.05sco Summit, J. (2013). Global citizenship demands new approaches to teaching and learning: AASCU’s Global Challenges initiative. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 45(6), 51–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2013.842109 Text of President Trump’s speech to joint session of Congress. (2017, February 28). VOA News. Retrieved from http://www.voanews.com/a/excerts-of-president-trumpsspeech-to-congress/3744629.html Thier, M. (2016). Left behind: Associating school-level variables with opportunities for global education. Paper presented at the 2015 Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education. Retrieved from http://www.aare.edu.au/publications-database.php/9769/left-behind-associatingschool-level-variables-with-opportunities-for-global-education Trump’s world: The new nationalism. (2016, November 19). The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21710249-his-call-put-america-firstdonald-trump-latest-recruit-dangerous Woolley, R. (2008). Spirituality and education for global citizenship: Developing student teachers’ perceptions and practice. International Journal of Children's Spirituality, 13(2), 145–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/13644360801965966 Zhao, Y. (2015). Counting what counts: Reframing education outcomes. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

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Available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre

Reimagining Educational Research: A Conversation Prudence L. Carter1 and Na’ilah Suad Nasir University of California Berkeley

Dean Carter: Professor Nasir’s research examines the racialized and cultural nature of learning and schooling, and the socio-cultural and political context of learning, especially in contexts with inequities and low educational outcomes. For those of you who don’t know, Professor Nasir was selected as the next president of the Spencer Foundation, the nation’s foremost philanthropic organization whose express purpose is to support and underwrite educational research. Here stands a history maker. I believe that you are the first woman of color to lead the foundation, and likely, one of the first women of color to lead a major foundation committed to academic research. I am deeply honored to be in your presence.

Professor Nasir and I are going to have a conversation here today. To start us off, we will try to set the tone this morning by asking some big questions of each other, of you, around where we are today in terms of educational research in the 21st century. In terms of thinking about the state of educational research, we ask: What should we be thinking about in this moment? What’s pressing in terms of directions? And whatever else you want to talk about, so here we go. I will start off by asking you, Professor Nasir, what’s on your mind about where you believe educational research might need to be headed in the next decade or so.

Professor Nasir: Thank you, good morning. I am also deeply honored and humbled to have this conversation with you. So, what’s on my mind? There is a lot on my mind.

There has been a lot on my mind when I think about this next career phase for me, and what it means to lead the Spencer Foundation. I have been thinking about the state of our field and where we should be headed. I feel like I have spent the last year and a half thinking deeply about this place and this campus, how we think about equity, and how we have built equitable structures here at a variety of levels. And so, I want to preface my comments by saying: This is, for me, an unprecedented historical moment in our country, and so it’s been the context for almost everything I have been thinking about since the November election of President Trump. How did we get to this place where there is a national platform for bigotry that has not been around since the 50s, at least? I think about our role as a field in relation to that and wonder where we dropped the ball. Where did we as a country drop the ball?

1

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Prudence L. Carter, PhD, University of California Berkeley, Graduate School of Education, 1501 Tolman Hall, Berkeley, CA, 94720-1670. Email: plcarter@berkeley.edu.

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142 Carter & Nasir So, when I think about research, I think about a couple of things. The first is the impact of our work. We have, I think as a field, had a bit of an inferiority complex, much like psychology a generation before, which is we have wanted to prove that our research is rigorous enough—is good enough—and in doing so, we have separated ourselves from practice. You see this when you look at the top 10 education schools, including Berkeley.

We have to re-engage in thinking about the big problems of our field, and we need to work to help solve some of those big problems of our field. The question of impact and educational research is both about the kind of work we are producing, and how we share our work with the world. So, in terms of the kind of work we produce, we should consider the big questions of our field rather than doing rigorous and intellectually stimulating things and then figuring out how they connect after the fact. Of course, there is always a role for basic research. I don’t want to say that all of our work needs to be directly applied, but I think we need to think collaboratively and collectively as a field about how we are working on the major educational problems. The collective piece is important.

With respect to how our work is taken up, or how we share our work, sometimes we don’t think enough about the consumers of our work. It is critical to think about how our work translates to educational policies, educational practice, and how we support our colleagues out in the schools, those who are running school districts, teaching, and creating educational environments for our children. How are we helping them do their work better with our research? I am thinking about what in doctoral research training might need to shift or be augmented to make our work more translatable, or what other layer of translation work does our field need? Our scholarship really has to be about how we are impacting the world. The big questions for the field are about access, about equity, about who has access to high-quality education and instruction in this country, and about what a high-quality education looks like. The big questions of our field are questions that can’t be addressed in our silos. They have to be addressed by us working together across disciplinary boundaries.

Dean Carter: I have been thinking a lot about this question, and I wonder if there is a way that we can diminish these boundaries. There is also the big question: Can we fundamentally and radically reduce educational inequality in our society if the macroeconomic and political contexts remain stagnant in terms of economic inequality?

Or is it just enough for us, as educational researchers, to work on assessing how schoolbased factors influence the educational well-being of those who historically have been left behind? In addition, there is a question of absolute versus relative inequality.

Absolute inequality is reduced by improving the outcomes of those historically disadvantaged, but relative inequality remains if the groups who are at the top continue to thrive at the same time. Many groups have pulled away at the top from those in the middle and the bottom. We can bring all those groups up, we can improve teaching and learning so that the inputs are good, and we can improve things in education, but does that fundamentally get rid of educational inequality? The answer is no, it does not fundamentally reduce relative inequality. There is a parallel question in the developing world in some ways: When a country has limited academic resources but is trying to improve mass public education and improve literacy, it is trying to improve the overall well-being of its population. Is it actually reducing inequality between the social classes,

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however? If we want to solve a bigger problem of inequality, we have to think about what the field of education needs to do in conjunction with those who work in economics, politics, health, and other areas. It is a quandary, I believe. Many of us believe that through our research we are focusing on the reduction of inequality when we explain the reduction of test-score differences. However, we are not necessarily doing that if we take these universalistic approaches where all boats are rising. Relative inequality endures.

We do not achieve either equality or equity, per se.

We use the term equity loosely, but do we fundamentally understand it? Do we know what equity means? Because equality is not equity, right? Equity requires us to invest in innovations, interventions, and solutions that will radically elevate less advantaged social classes, and try to diminish the gradients of inequality among social groups along the socioeconomic ladder. (I am talking like a sociologist now because that is what I am.)

Further, where is the political will in American society, global society, to get there? Do we have the will to do that? Is it enough? What I have been thinking about, too, is who utilizes the work we produce as researchers? For the last three years, I have worked on a research utilization project: How federal policymakers actually use educational research to make their decisions. Regrettably, very little of our research is absorbed by those who make the decisions that significantly impact our children’s educational well-being. How do we change that? Those are the people making the decisions who have their hands on the levers of what’s going to become policy mandates. They don’t necessarily have full control over what becomes practice—practices within the microcosms of classrooms and within schools—but they do make the mandates, and a lot of those policies are problematic. So how do we change that relationship? Have you thought about that?

Professor Nasir: Well indeed I have. I have so much I want to say. You talked about the political will and that, of course, is one of the key questions of this moment: Does our national policy reflect our political will? Especially if you think about the liberal perspective, right? I don’t know if I would say yes to that right now. I think it reflects not having a coherent, cohesive agenda and working together to achieve it. I feel like there are two ways I imagine going from here with education: One is, can we think about a national vision that has equity at its core? And what does that national vision look like?

What do we want to see? Aside from all the challenges and problems and misfires that we know our system of education operates with, if we were going to create schools, if we were going to create a system of education that serves all children, what would it look like? What if we started with that question? What do we know about that? And then I thought, well, we actually already know what those schools look like, and in a room like this we know because those are the ones we’re looking for to send our kids to. We know exactly what we’re looking for, right? Places where kids can develop a strong sense of themselves as whole people, where their self-esteem is intact, where they feel empowered, places where they are engaging in deep and critical learning, places where they are learning to think critically about our world, to be socially engaged, to be civically engaged, places where their full potential is allowed to thrive and develop.

Right?

And then you think about who we are providing that for now as a society, and who we are not providing it for. And what would it look like to provide it for those who don’t have it? I think a lot on this question in relationship to my own children, and what it

144 Carter & Nasir means as a Black parent to be looking for functional schools for my kids and feeling like I’m always choosing either the place that’s going to be intellectually engaging and rigorous or the place that is not going kill their spirit as Black children. And the fact that I’m always choosing that means we’re pretty far, and I’m well resourced as far as resources go in society. So if I can’t even find it, how can someone with fewer resources?

So we’re far from the vision of what we want to create and provide for all of our kids.

Even the phrase all children is politically problematic because what that school looks like for my kids might be different than what it looks like for someone else’s kids—what that empowerment looks like, what that cultural richness looks like, what the intellectual development looks like. And so, I think there’s something important about holding a higher vision on the one hand and having a vision, not just as individuals but also as a field, that we can agree on. Then there is a whole other arm where we might be engaged, where we help to develop the political will. Political agendas don’t unfold because people think it’s a good idea. Political agendas unfold because people work together strategically to make them unfold. So there’s this cultivation of political will that needs to happen, that I think is also really important, that we’ve ignored, right?

Dean Carter: I agree, and I think you are right. At the same time, we live in a country where many political differences exist, and if we live in a diverse society, we have to allow for the spectrum in diversity of ideas and ideology. I believe that one main societal challenge, and where education is implicated, is that we are not raising nor socializing a generation about how to live and share power and resources in a society of difference. When you think about where we are currently in the United States, how divided and color-coded, I keep wondering: Where are the points of intervention? How do we get people to look beyond their own self-interests, to look toward the interest of a stable and healthy democracy in the nation? How do you change the collective mindset so that people will allow coexistence with a variation of thought and being, without undermining the existence of those who do not look or think like them? And so this is a micro- and meso-level problem of inequality that is creating and reproducing a macrolevel problem of inequality.

David Labaree is a historian down at Stanford who writes about education as a public good versus education as a private good. He has written a seminal article about the fact that in the last 50 years or so, many of us have subscribed to the idea of education as a private good. How do I insure that my children are as well educated as they can possibly be so that they can be competitive, so they can get into great colleges and universities, so they can get the best jobs? And what that has entailed is our collusion in processes of inequality in terms of where we live, who can and cannot attend our local schools, who are members in our friendship circles, which often produce or engender social capital. All of these decisions actually reproduce inequality. Every last one of us is implicated in it.

How do we check ourselves in the choices we’re making? How do we also change the socialization process—the hidden curriculum in education—so that when we send our children to school, when we make personal choices, we can encourage them to be more aware of the processes that reproduce inequality in our society and of how our behaviors may hamper the ability of education to become a public good that enriches and enhances our democracy? And that’s one of the biggest dilemmas. We can say that the structures and policies in place are so big that we cannot do anything about them, but consider our

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everyday behaviors, what we do, what we engage in. I’m guilty of that. Most of us want to rely on schools where the test scores are the highest and where the teachers have the most experience, and then we use that logic to determine that those are the best schools.

Yet, when you look at other indicators, and particularly for historically disadvantaged groups, there is frequently a miner’s canary in such schools. Many are not such great schools when you look at indicators such as the ethos of inclusion for all groups, these groups’ sense of belonging, collective efficacy, and ability to participate in every facet of the school. Then when you examine other schools that may not look as great on paper–– based test score outcomes––they do very well in the socio-psychological and sociocultural domains, which is why I am happy about California having multiple measures today. We have the [California School] dashboards, where school-quality index is multimodal, and it is not just about test scores. I believe that is necessary because that can help us address why some kids are doing well in some well-resourced school contexts and others are not. Why do we have some of the persistent problems at Berkeley High, for example, or in other districts like Palo Alto? I’ve seen it there. Everywhere, the widest forms of educational inequality are in college towns across the nation: Berkeley, Evanston, Palo Alto, Ann Arbor, and these are good-willed, good-natured people living in these places. How do we penetrate that? Where does the research need to go? Where do the interventions need to go, the solutions, to tackle that problem?

Professor Nasir: I agree with everything you just said. The point about buying into education as a private good is a point well taken. I also think, though, that what we are missing is a narrative that frames things differently. We’ve been buying into this test score narrative, a narrative that measures the quality of schooling by test scores, the quality of teaching by the test scores of students. We’ve been in this cultural place of accepting these distal measures of the quality of education for too long. So, if I could mastermind everything, there would be a big narrative shift that brings back this notion of a public good. Because I actually think people believe that more than their behavior suggests. There are a couple of deep beliefs I hold about human nature: [First], that people are fundamentally good and socially oriented and want good for themselves and for others. I think that’s a fundamental truth, at least I have to believe that. It’s just that what that looks like for each of us is negotiable. Second, people are pack animals, so we move to the mean. And so, that’s why I keep coming back to this national vision, or set of priorities or ethics around education, whatever that is. People need a way to make the connection between those fundamental beliefs and their own actions every day. Giving people something to believe in and work toward, at a higher level than themselves, is important and something we could engage in as a field.

The point about the college towns is so fascinating to me. Our colleague, sean reardon, has this amazing new dataset that looks at achievement in all the school districts across the country and is able to look at the places where the inequities are biggest, where achievement is highest, and where achievement outpaces what you might expect for a particular district. It’s an example of how our work needs to take on these bigger questions. Of course, I think that work also needs a qualitative follow-up because the measure of school quality is still test scores in that dataset, beautifully normed and meaned and all of that. But qualitative data would allow us to think about what is happening in those places on a whole other level. But again, that’s part of why research

146 Carter & Nasir should be a collective activity. So sean can say, we should look here, here, here, and here in the country to get at these types of questions. And then there could be teams of folks that say, okay, I’m going to go here and look at this question. And then there’s collective building of knowledge.

Let me ask you a question: You’ve been here at Berkeley as the Dean for almost a year now. How are you thinking, in your position as the Dean, about the role of graduate education schools in all of what we’ve been talking about? What can education schools do?

Dean Carter: That’s a great question, and I want to pick up on something you said earlier. First, when I came here, I said that under my tenure, my main mission was to figure out how to facilitate, broker, and lead us as a school to make the work that we need to do here matter more—matter to our local communities, to our district, to our nation, to our world. I am trying to do that by facilitating research-policy-practice linkages and deepening those linkages. That is my goal. The first year, you try to grow your legs and get them under you, to learn a new institutional culture and context, and it has really been about, first, how do we organize ourselves in a more efficient way, so that we can actually focus on those visions? What I have learned––and this was my being idealistic–– is that the dean’s role is significantly more managerial than programmatic, and I had not anticipated that. So my role is really as a shepherd, to encourage, to support faculty and students and staff to do that work. Someone told me once, and I don’t know if they were being kind or not, that to be a dean you have to be a narcissist. And I thought that was really interesting because I feel like as a dean, I’m actually being masochistic. It has entailed suspending my own research career, and that has been a major sacrifice. So what makes me happy, heartens me, and keeps me wanting to come back every day is when I look out into the room, and I engage with students and faculty, and I hear about the things they are doing. Hopefully, I am able to fundraise, to program, to organize, and to facilitate things at an organizational level, so that the good work can still be done.

Schools of education cannot marginalize themselves from the rest of the campus.

What we need is to be in deeper conversations with disciplines across campus. We need to show up at other kinds of talks and not just talks in our own school. Yesterday, I was at a big lecture given by your predecessor, former Spencer Foundation President Michael McPherson, and I looked around the room, and I actually was saddened because I saw very few people from the [Graduate School of Education] community there, but I saw tons of people from the social sciences and history, and this is one of the major highereducation thinkers in the country. Now I know people are busy––I had a 12-hour workday yesterday––but I do think it is important for us to take the time to broaden our scholarly horizons, our intellectual engagement across these boundaries. One of my objectives is to bring this school more toward the center of the campus because there’s a lot going on at Berkeley. There is quite a bit that education scholars, researchers, and practitioners can do to inform some of the initiatives that are being taken up around the campus, but in order for us to be effective, we have to be present. And the dean brokers that, but I can’t do it alone. And so that’s one of the things that I encourage students particularly to do. There are initiatives. There are all kinds of fascinating things going on for students. I know we are all busy, but I want to encourage us to be more invested in the campus. Schools of education could render themselves obsolete if we do not find a way

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to work with the people who are making the major decisions. So my vision is to make us matter more. And it’s not just structural. We have agency as an organization of individuals to be a part of the process. I am doing everything I can behind the scenes. I have no magic, but I am going to try to do the best that I can.

Author Biographies Prudence L. Carter is Dean and Professor of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California Berkeley. Dr. Carter’s research agenda focuses on causes of and solutions to enduring social and cultural inequalities among social groups, especially in education and schooling. Specifically, she examines academic and mobility differences influenced by the dynamics of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in the U.S. and global society. Her expertise spans issues of youth identity and educational wellbeing; urban poverty; social and cultural inequality; and the sociocultural and organizational contexts of schools. Dr. Carter is the author of the award-winning Keepin’ It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White (2005), and Stubborn Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. and South African Schools (2012), and co-editor of Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance (2013), all published by Oxford University Press, along with numerous articles and book chapters. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the Sociological Research Association, and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for the William T. Grant Foundation where she chairs the Program Committee.

Na’ilah Suad Nasir is the sixth President of the Spencer Foundation, which supports research about education. She was a faculty member at the University of California Berkeley in 2008–2017, where she served as Vice Chancellor of Equity and Inclusion from November 2015 forward. Nasir earner her PhD in Educational Psychology at the University of California Los Angeles in 2000, and was a member of the faculty in the School of Education at Stanford University in 2000–2008. Her work focuses on issues of race, culture, learning, and identity. She is the author of Racialized Identities: Race and Achievement for African-American Youth, and has published numerous scholarly articles. Nasir is a member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). In 2016, she was the recipient of the AERA Division G Mentoring Award.