By David Love –

While much of the attention around symbolism in honor of the Confederacy has centered around Confederate monuments, statues and the flag itself, there are many schools across the U.S. named after Confederate leaders. The public schools are the next battlefield on continued attempts to honor the white supremacist, secessionist cause, and the people who fought to keep Black people in bondage. Sadly, over 150 years after the end of the Civil War, nearly 200 schools are named for Confederate military and administrative officials. Many Black and Latino children attend these schools that memorialize this Southern slave-owning culture yet teach them the Civil War was fought over states’ rights and economic issues. As the process to remove the slave masters, secessionists and Klan leaders from these schools begins in earnest, it is necessary to consider the impact of such indoctrination and negative imagery on the development of young minds.

Across the country, there are 191 schools named for pro-slavery Confederate figures, according to an analysis by HuffPost based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics. More than 129,000 students attend these schools, over half of them nonwhite — 41 percent white, 32 percent Latino and 21 percent Black — including 27,000 Black students.

The recent events surrounding the August 12 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia— where one woman was killed and others injured when a Nazi sympathizer rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters — has caused some Confederate-named schools to erase their Dixie-inspired names.

Some schools were ahead of the game, to the extent that a decision in the 21st century to rebrand a school honoring a Confederate general is by any means a proactive measure. In 2013, the Duval County, Florida, school board renamed a Jacksonville high school named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who founded the Ku Klux Klan. The predominantly Black school had borne the name of the Klan’s first Grand Wizard’s since 1959, when schools in the South were undergoing desegregation.

The debate has begun in Manassas, Virginia, where there is a move to remove the name of Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from the local high school. Named in 1964 during the civil rights movement, the student body is 17 percent Black, 19 percent white and more than half Hispanic. A petition is circulating in Tyler, Texas, to change the name of Robert E. Lee High. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least 39 schools were built after the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case, and a quarter of them have majority-Black student bodies.

In Jacksonville, Florida, where there are seven high schools named after Confederates, the district is not considering any name changes at this time. The city council president, however, has begun the process of removing Confederate monuments.

Georgia, the home of Atlanta Black Star, has eight counties named after Confederate figures.  According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, more than 20 schools or school districts in the Peach State are named after Confederates. For example, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Treasurer Robert Toombs and Senator Ben Hill each has a county and a school district named after him. After Virginia, Georgia has the most Confederate symbols in the United States — with 194, vs. 223 for Virginia.

Some school districts are going after Confederate symbolism, treating the Stars and Bars like a swastika. For example, the school board in Orange County, North Carolina, voted to adopt a new dress code forbidding students from wearing anything containing a Confederate flag, swastika or Ku Klux Klan logo.

The issue of racist and white supremacist symbolism in American schools is brought into focus in light of changing demographics. As of 2014, for the first time in America’s public schools, the percentage of white students fell below 50 percent—to 49.5 percent — according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Across the country, 25 percent of public school students were Latino, 16 percent were black and 5 percent were Asian or Pacific Islander, with American Indian/Alaska Native and students of two or more races comprising the remainder.

“Confederate names of schools or institutions must be changed immediately. Such names make a very violent … white supremacist statement about who should have won the Civil War,” John Sims, a Black artist who has led an effort to burn and bury the Confederate flag throughout the South, told Atlanta Black Star. Sims has turned the effort into an annual event called Burn and Bury Memorial Day, a new ritual to turn the Confederate icon into a “symbol of cathartic action,” and allow for healing and transformation. “And to have black students go to such named schools and receive diplomas and certificates with these names sustains a fantasy, an historical infection that we must clear. And to begin a national healing, we must collectively understand that the Civil War is over, the Confederates lost, and the schools, streets, buildings, etc. with Confederate names must be renamed, immediately.”

Given that thousands of students still attend class in schools named for white supremacists who fought to keep Black people in bondage, this begs the question: What are students learning about the Civil War?

There is a hodgepodge of interpretations of the Civil War taught across the country, varying according to the state or even the school district. Often these decisions are decided locally. For example, in Texas, students learn that slavery was an “after issue” affecting the war. Textbooks describe slaves as “workers” and “immigrants,” while the curriculum mentions Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson as examples of “the importance of effective leadership in a constitutional republic.”

Consider also that Confederate supporters, who see the “War of Between the States” as an honorable one from the Southern point of view, have long promoted the myth that the Civil War was an issue of states’ rights — which itself is a racially loaded term — and economics rather than slavery. The result is miseducation on this decisive period in U.S. history. According to a  2011 Pew Research Center poll, 48 percent of Americans believed the Civil War was primarily about states’ rights, and 38 percent saying slavery was the main cause, and 9 percent saying both factors were equally important. The differences in responses were more racial than geographic. For example, 48 percent of whites selected states’ rights over slavery, as opposed to 39 percent of Blacks. However, 49 percent of Southern whites, and 48 percent of non-Southern whites identified states’ rights.

Edward H. Sebesta, an author and expert on the neo-Confederate movement, suggests the movement to rename the schools is a very recent phenomenon, one which African-Americans and Latinos have not entertained in the past. Sebesta — co-editor of Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction (University of Texas Press) and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (University Press of Mississippi) — said many schools with Confederate names are predominantly Black and Latino.

“Sometime in the first half of the 1990s when I was walking out of a book store in Arlington, Texas in the parking lot was a bus from Mississippi with a basketball team unloading. They were all wearing green uniforms and what was striking was that the uniforms all had Jefferson Davis High School and the team was all African-American and Black,” Sebesta told Atlanta Black Star. “I didn’t know what to make of it, but thought that perhaps being that the team was from Mississippi there wasn’t much they could do about it and lived with it.”

In 1999, Sebesta said, the predominantly African-American Jefferson Davis Elementary School in Dallas, Texas, changed its name to Barbara Jordan Elementary School. “However, that was the exception. Even though the name of that school was changed, there wasn’t any movement or effort to change the names of Dallas schools named after Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson until 2015” he said, noting that with a few exceptions, he has not heard of any attempts to change school names until the after the Charleston Massacre in 2015.

“This is disturbing. School boards with multiple African-American and Hispanic members didn’t take any effort to change the names. Students seemed to accept these names. I don’t hear of student protests. PTAs and parent groups didn’t raise the issue either,” Sebesta added, suggesting these Confederate names were accepted as the way things were. “Generations of African-American students were educated in a built environment which unequivocally states that Black lives don’t matter and teach that lesson to them,” he said, offering that while speaking to groups for research on Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader he found that Black teachers believed the Civil War was about states’ rights.

“Recently, an NPR poll found that 44 percent of African Americans thought that Confederate monuments should stay up and 40 percent thought they should come down and 16 percent undecided,” the neo-Confederate researcher said. “Maybe the poll has some bias and you can argue a few percent, but really the percentage for should be around 5 percent because some people get confused when answering a poll,” Sebesta added. “I think it is safe to say that if there was a poll was asking Jewish people whether a Hitler highway was acceptable not only would the result be 100 percent against, Jewish groups would be mobilized to find out why that was even considered a question to ask.

“Colin Kaepernick refuses to do the Pledge of Allegiance and all hell is breaking loose with white people,” Sebesta noted. “It might be argued that changing names isn’t a priority, but that doesn’t explain the poll results.” Sebesta believes part of the problem is that for generations and up until today, U.S. history textbooks have taught a version of history in which the Confederacy is acceptable. “I recently did a review of a mainstream prestigious American history textbook, and it teaches that Black lives don’t matter. African-American students read these textbooks along with other students. The lessons seem to be learned.” In other words, the damage has been done to the psyche of Black students.

Source: Reading, Writing, Racist: Thousands of Black Students Attend Schools Named for Confederate Figures – Atlanta Black Star

The Qatar Foundation has been funding U.S. K-12 public schools, seeking to ramp up their Arabic language and cultural curricula with an eye toward globalization.

Source: Qatar Funding Globalization in U.S. Public Schools – Breitbart

As so-called lunch-shaming practices come under increasing scrutiny, the search for solutions – both public and private – has intensified.

Josh Kenworthy –

Jaynelle Minor remembers the anguish on the faces of the school cafeteria workers. Under district policy, they were required to deny lunch to kids whose parents hadn’t paid their school lunch bills.

Ms. Minor, the student nutrition supervisor for New Mexico’s Farmington Municipal School District, also remembers how some of those workers would sneak back into the cafeteria to get fruit or some other snack to stop the children from going hungry. What the kindness of those workers couldn’t stop, however, was a phenomenon known as “lunch shaming” – policies that required lunch workers to single out children whose parents have not paid their lunch fees.

To some observers, lunch shaming is a practice that has spiraled out of control in US public schools.

Some school districts deal with the problem by giving students whose parents have not paid lunch fees a bare-bones cold lunch, such as a sandwich consisting of two pieces of bread and one slice of cheese. But in some other districts, lunch shaming goes further: it may include dumping the hot lunches students had hoped to eat into the trash in front of them, making them do chores to pay off their lunch debt, requiring them to wear wristbands, or sending them home with stamps on their arms saying, “I need lunch money.”

In New Mexico it was Sen. Michael Padilla (D) – who said that as a hungry foster child he had experienced first-hand the pain of lunch shaming – who introduced the Hunger-Free Students’ Bill of Rights. The bill was passed by the New Mexico state legislature last week. Other lawmakers nationwide have reached out to him for guidance on how they can end lunch shaming in their own states, Senator Padilla told NPR.

California and Texas have tabled similar bills, and by July 1, 2017, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) will require every school district to have a written policy that clearly communicates to staff and parents how schools will deal with children whose parents have not paid their lunch bills.

In New Mexico, says Jennifer Ramo, the executive director of antipoverty group New Mexico Appleseed, politicians on both sides of the aisle were “horrified” by the lunch-shaming practices that have been coming to light.

And it’s not just in New Mexico. Stories of lunch-shaming practices have made headlines at a number of schools across the United States. At a public school in Salt Lake City, up to 40 kids with overdue accounts had their meals thrown away in front of them. In the Canon-McMillan school district in Pennsylvania, a cafeteria worker quit her job after she was forced to deny a young boy a hot meal.

School districts have defended such actions by pointing out that unpaid lunch fees are not an insignificant problem. In 2014, data from the School Nutrition Association showed that more than 70 percent of US public school districts had some amount of meal debt, ranging from as little as $2 up to as high as $4.7 million for the largest districts.

Canon-McMillan superintendent Matthew Daniels told Action News 4 WTAE that school policies regarding unpaid lunch fees were simply intended to motivate parents to keep current on their child’s lunch tab. Before denying hot lunches to students whose parents had not paid, the district was owed $60,000 and $100,000 by 300 families annually, he said. After adopting the policy, the debt was reduced to a total of $20,000 owed by 70 families.

In theory, there should never be a schoolchild in the US who goes hungry at lunchtime. Government-funded programs like The National Free Lunch Program offer free or reduced-cost lunches to millions of US students each year. But the families of many students who qualify opt not to take advantage of such programs – either because of stigma connected to the program or perhaps lack of understanding about how to connect with it.

Also, school officials say, it is not necessarily the parents whose kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (those whose annual household income falls between 130 percent and 185 percent of the 2017-18 federal poverty level) that most often fail to pay. Many times the households that don’t pay for lunch are ones that – on paper, anyway – would appear to be able to do so.

Lunch shaming is not necessarily a new problem, but it’s one that has increased in intensity in recent months.

“There are a lot of problems we’ve had with stigma and lunch-money status for a long, long time and this has bubbled up as the last war in this area,” says David Just, a professor of economics and psychology at Cornell University, whose research has focused on school lunch programs.

And as the problems have grown worse, the search for solutions – public and private – has become more focused as well.

New Mexico’s new law will also require schools to ramp up communication with parents in an effort to boost registration for the free-and-reduced priced lunch, which has been slipping. Meanwhile, the number of students who qualify is on the rise in around 40 percent of school districts across the nation.

Ms. Ramos of New Mexico Appleseed says she believes the USDA’s requirement that each school must have a policy will help, as well. The policies might still be “awful,” she says, “but I think this is going to put a lot of heat on districts to come up with [something] somewhat humane.”

In districts where at least 40 percent of children qualify for free lunch based on data from federal aid programs, schools can claim the Community Eligibility Provision, a status that allows the district to provide free lunch to all students, thus doing away with the lunch-shaming dilemma.

In some school districts, public citizens are coming to the rescue. There was the tweet by New York writer Ashley C. Ford that went viral late last year, and saw people all over the country contact their local schools and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. A motel owner in Burlington, Iowa, paid off the outstanding meal debts of 89 students.

Clarence Richardson and his wife, Anna, both attorneys who moved to Waltham, Mass. two years ago, wanted to give back to their community. Inspired by a Facebook post about some folks in Baltimore doing something similar, they started a GoFundMe page last year to see if they could make a dent in the district’s roughly $7,200 in meal debt.

By the time the campaign closed a month later, they had raised $6,042.

In Farmington, Minor says the district will be setting up an “angel fund” that will make it easy for businesses and individuals to donate.

Two years ago, Farmington had already introduced a kinder policy that allows students with a negative balance to get three more hot meals. After that, they’re provided with a different “meal offering,” which still meets federal nutrition guidelines and is packaged the same as other lunch options available to all kids.

But soon, under a new district law, the district will be required to soften its policy even further, and Minor says she understands.

“You don’t ever want to have to single a child out,” says Minor, who is mother of two children. “We want to feed them all, and treat them all equally, and give them the best opportunity to excel in school.”

Source: When a child has no lunch money, whose problem is it? – CSMonitor.com

On his mother’s side the 44th president’s descendant of slave owners, raising the question, Should a Barack Obama statue be built?

Former President Barack Obama will have a bronze statue of his likeness revealed some time next month in Rapid City, South Dakota. It is one in a series of all former presidents mounted on street corners throughout the city (one of which is the Bill Clinton one which his rape accuser Juanita Broaddrick has demanded to be removed).

But it looks as if there will be a problem with the statue of the 44th POTUS, especially in today’s hypersensitive racial climate. No, we’re not talking about disgusting neo-Nazis protesting a statue dedicated to a Black Man. Nor is it because as president economic conditions for African-Americas relative to Caucasians declined. Bu.t no Obama statue should be built because he is descended from slave-owners.

In 2007, a genealogical researcher determined that ancestors on Obama’s mother’s side were slave owners. And based on recent news you simply can’t have that kind of history if you’re going to have a statue in this day and age.

Via the Guardian:

As the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, Obama has seemed to embody a harmonious vision of America’s multiracial society. However, recent revelations have thrown up an unexpected twist in the tale.

Obama’s ancestors on his white mother’s side appear to have been slave owners. William Reitwiesner, an amateur genealogical researcher, has published a history of Obama’s mother’s family and discovered that her ancestors have a distinctly shadowy past.

Reitwiesner traced Obama’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, George Washington Overall, and found that he owned two slaves in Kentucky: a 15-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man. He also found out that Obama’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Duvall, also owned a pair of slaves listed in an 1850 census record. They were a 60-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman. In fact, the Duvalls were a wealthy family whose members were descended from a major landowner, Maureen Duvall, whose estate owned at least 18 slaves in the 17th century.

Wow, that’s a lot of slaves.

Following the logical progression of the liberal anti-history brigade, anything and everything featuring Obama’s name must be removed and scrubbed from our minds, books, and records.

At the very least there ought to be a movement to stop the Rapid City and any other planned statues of Barack Obama.  Think of how it will confuse the liberals who are trying to erase our history, those snowflakes who grew up receiving participation trophies because the purpose of sports was to feel good about one’s self instead of kicking the butt of the other team. The safe-space occupants who demand leaders who believe it really possible to negotiate with terrorists or lead from behind. The statue bashing millennials who create safe spaces where they can escape trigger words and differing opinions and bask in the warmth of group think. Their heads might explode.

Source: Hey Statue-Hating Snowflakes: Barack Obama’s Ancestors Owned Slaves

The work of a building administrator is never done. But should that consume the school leader?

A principal could very easily become overwhelmed by the endless meetings, events, phone calls and students that continually need attention. In order to maintain a balance between life and work, a leader must establish non-negotiables, set limits and of course maintain their personal identity. 

Non-Negotiables

There will always be tasks awaiting completion whether it is creating a staff meeting agenda, meeting with a group of students that are searching approval for an event or curriculum revisions that need the time and attention of a building principal. The first step for a principal is recognizing and accepting the reality that the list of tasks will continually evolve. It is the norm that a new list of tasks will be added for every job that was checked off the day. As many teachers leave the classroom to become building leaders it can be quite uncomfortable leaving school at the end of the day knowing there are already 4-5 new items that need attention the next day. Establishing some non-negotiables will allow the building leader to have some piece of mind when leaving the office for the evening.

These terms may differ for each administrator based on priorities and leadership philosophies. One example may be that the principal does not allow email notifications on their personal devices beginning at a set time in the evening until the next morning. As long as staff and superintendent are made aware of this standard, this allows the principal to truly have time away to recharge and prepare for the next day. Other non-negotiables may be whether emails will be responded to over the weekend or clearly established office hours in which he/she is available for meetings. Whatever the non-negotiables may be, it is important that they are clearly communicated to co-workers. Once these are established and communicated, a building leader must be consistent with adhering to the standards set. See this article for practical steps to take at work and at home.

Set Limits

It can be very easy for a building leader to quickly become submerged in the various tasks required to be successful. It is critical that clear limits be set in regards to management of time, schedules, personal commitments and technology use. In order to set these limits a leader needs to be disciplined to maintain the guidelines, he/she determines. Intentionally identifying specific timeframes for parent or teacher meetings or times in which the office closes in evening to ensure family commitments are met are crucial to maintaining life/work balance.

Setting these limits on a weekly basis and sticking to them can be difficult as there will always be a phone ringing after the office lights go out or a teacher asking for 5 minutes of time as you are walking out to make your child’s recital on time. If the lines of these limits are blurred, it will become impossible to maintain harmony among work and home. See this article for some tips on setting limits.

Lost Identity

The role of a building leader should not become the sole identity of an educational leader. The intentional practice of adhering to the non-negotiables and setting limits will allow for personal commitments to be met, the participation in healthy practices and engagement in special interests or hobbies. These facets are equally as important as work responsibilities in maintaining a continual ebb and flow of career and personal peace as a building leader. See this article on how our work should not define us and having a holistic identity.

Comment: What are some limits you set to help maintain a balance between work and life? Please share in the comments below.

Keywords: Educational Leadership, Work Life Balance, Career Identity

References

Mentalhealthamericanet. (2017). Mental Health America. Retrieved from: http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/work-life-balance

Tulipano, R. (August 20, 2015). 5 reasons why your work Doesn’t define you. Retrieved from Career: https://gentwenty.com/reasons-work-doesnt-define-you/

Uscher, J. (2011). 5 Tips for Better Work-Life Balance. Retrieved from WebMD: http://www.webmd.com/women/features/balance-life#1

“Who Is To Blame for Charlottesville?”

By Donna Garner

8.14.17

 

Who was involved in the deplorable and violent events in Charlottesville, Virginia this last weekend?  Our nation witnessed Black Lives Matter, White Supremacists, Anti-Trumpsters, Neo-Nazis, and the KKK yelling, screaming, fighting, cussing, destroying property, venting their rage, killing protesters, maiming bystanders, and injuring first responders.

 

What do these groups all have in common?  They are all products of our culture, one in which the majority of our nation’s K-16 students have been indoctrinated by the Obama administration’s anti-American Common Core and the leftwing professors who populate our colleges and universities. Aided by the Democrats and the leftist media, our nation is now “reaping the whirlwind.”  

 

These efforts to destroy American Exceptionalism and to create a false narrative of Black Bondage/White Privilege along with the LGBTQ’s anti-marriage/anti-family agenda have infected our nation with a dangerous “disease.”  

 

We saw this “disease” culminate in Charlottesville when the alleged driver, James Alex Fields Jr. (20 years of age), plowed into the crowd and caused death and destruction.

 

At 20 years of age, James Fields (who grew up in Northern Kentucky) had experienced many years of Common Core curriculum.  Kentucky was the first state in the country to adopt the Common Core State Standards (2010).  Sitting there seven hours a day in a Common Core-saturated environment undoubtedly helped to send James Fields down the path to anti-Americanism.  

 

To conquer this “disease,” our nation’s schools must go back to the teaching of fact-based (instead of emotion-based), academic, patriotic curriculum with a heavy emphasis on our historical, primary documents (e.g., The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, etc.) and on the heroes/heroines who have made America great.  Students need to base their logical and analytical thought upon credible facts from the context surrounding the various historical/literary events. It is ludicrous and nonsensical to hold past historical and literary figures to the leftist standards that are being so widely espoused in the U. S. today.

  

 

ARTICLES THAT ILLUSTRATE THE DANGERS OF THE COMMON CORE AGENDA

 

1.11.17 – “Biased Classroom Politics…”  By Lance Izumi – The Daily Caller —

http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/11/biased-classroom-politics-another-reason-for-school-choice/#ixzz4VUiu1K00

 

Excerpts from this article:

 

In Mountain View, California, a history teacher was suspended after he lectured students on the parallels between the rise of Trump and Hitler. Both Trump and Hitler, said the teacher, wanted to “make their countries great again.” Supporting national renewal evidently put Trump on the slippery slope to genocide.

 

In North Carolina, an English teacher made students compare speeches by Trump and Hitler. During a lesson, the teacher was recorded saying, in reference to Trump, “Basically, the only people who seem to be safe from this guy are white Christian males.”

 

In San Francisco, the teachers union issued an anti-Trump lesson plan that could be used by its 6,000 members. In a letter to school district staff by the plan’s author, social studies teacher Fakhra Shah, Trump is labeled a “racist and sexist man” who has “become president of our country by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base.”

 

The lesson plan itself is clearly unbalanced. For example, while students are asked to create a poster that would address Trump supporters and a poster that would address Clinton supporters, students are only asked to discuss the Trump poster through the lens of, “How we will not engage in dehumanizing those who dehumanize us.”

 

The resources recommended by the lesson plan include articles, reports and videos by hardcore leftist publications, organizations and individuals such as Mother Jones magazine, the Southern Poverty Law Center and producer/director Michael Moore.

 

California’s new history and social studies curriculum framework is weighted overwhelmingly toward a liberal viewpoint on subject matter to be studied.

 

For example, pages and pages in the framework are devoted to identity politics, and the environmentalist, sexual, and anti-Vietnam War movements, with detailed and extensive bibliographical references. In contrast, the contemporaneous conservative movement, which succeeded in electing Californian Ronald Reagan as president, with its complex mixture of social, economic and national security sub-movements, is given cursory and passing mention, with no references provided.

 

Worse, the state curriculum framework ensures that this bias will be systemic throughout California public schools. Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, warns that California’s framework will likely spread across the country “as publishers forced to meet the demands of the most populous state offer their revised textbooks nationally.”

 

The bottom line is that politicizing the classroom negatively affects students. As The Economist points out, “Students who dissent from the teacher’s view may feel alienated from the discussion and uncomfortable expressing their ideas openly.”

 

Further, “Younger, more impressionable children with [undeveloped] understanding of politics may be confused if they hear their parents supporting candidate X while their teacher insists on candidate Y.”

 

The magazine concludes, “Either way, it seems a mistake to make political advocacy a main thrust of the school day.” However, if some schools insist on politicizing instruction, then children should be able to escape such indoctrination through school choice tools such as intra and inter-district transfer programs, charter schools, and private-school choice programs such as education savings accounts.

 

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7.13.16 – “Eighth Graders’ White Privilege Poem Takes First Place” – by Dr. Susan Berry — Breitbart — http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/07/13/eighth-graders-white-privilege-poem-takes-first-place/

 

 

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8.3.16 –  This video illustrates how the Common Core agenda is being used to manipulate the way students think.  Alice Linahan testified before the Texas Senate Education Committee.  She told what happened to her daughter in an Advanced Placement English III class with its intrusive “philosophy” survey:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FazA3Jl_RsI

 

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8.27.15 — “Sorry, College Board’s AP U. S. History Still Leftist”– by Donna Garner – EdViews.org — /sorry-college-boards-ap-u-s-history-leftist/

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6.24.14 — “David Coleman Attacks Students’ Love of America” — by Donna Garner – EdViews.org —

/david-coleman-attacks-students-love-america/

 

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1.16.13 – “Who’s Writing Common Core Social Studies Standards?” — by J.R. Wilson –EducationNews.org — http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/j-r-wilson-whos-writing-common-core-social-studies-standards/

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9.13.13 — “UPDATE:  Common Core Porn Novel” — by Donna Garner – EducationViews.org —

http://educationviews.org/update-common-core-porn-novel-by-donna-garner-9-13-13/

 

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12.17.13 – “Common Core Sexualizes American School Children” – by Mary Jo Anderson – Crisis Magazine —

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/common-core-sexualizes-american-school-children

 

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12.11.13 – “Common Core Standards’ Devastating Impact on Literary Study and Analytical Thinking” – by Sandra Stotsky – Heritage Foundation – http://tinyurl.com/yb5q3szk

 

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3.23.12 – “Teacher: One Maddening Day Working with the Common Core” – by Valeria Strauss – Washington Post —

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/teacher-one-maddening-day-working-with-the-common-core/2012/03/15/gIQA8J4WUS_blog.html

 

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4.16.14 – “Common Core Is a Curriculum” – by Donna Garner – EducationViews.org — /common-core-curriculum/

An Interview with Carol A. Mullen: On Creativity in China

 

Michael F. Shaughnessy –

 

1) First of all, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself, your education, and experience?

 

I’m a Professor of Educational Leadership at Virginia Tech where I prepare classroom teachers to become highly effective education leaders (e.g., school principals). I also conduct research and contribute service to the profession. I’m a two-time Fulbright Scholar, my first Fulbright visit occurring in China in 2015. Next, I will be in Canada fall 2017. I specialize in mentoring in higher education and K–12 settings, creativity and innovation, and social justice and diversity. An experienced higher education administrator, I have been a department chair, director, and associate dean.

 

As an author, I’ve published 225 refereed journal articles and book chapters, 15 special issues of journals, and 21 books, (co)authored and (co)edited. My latest book is Creativity and Education in China: Paradox and Possibilities for an Era of Accountability (Routledge/Kappa Delta Pi, 2017). I served as President of the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (renamed the International Council of Professors of Educational Leadership [ICPEL]). I received the 2016 Jay D. Scribner Mentoring Award from the University Council for Educational Administration and the 2017 Living Legend Award from ICPEL. My doctorate is from The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada.

2) Now, who has influenced you or impacted your views on China?

 

A major influence affecting my views on China is Yhao Zhao, author of Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? (Thousand Oaks, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2014). Creativity models from the educational psychology field also significantly influenced my work in China and writing of Creativity and Education in China. The sources of these models are:

 

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: The psychology of discovery and invention. London: HarperPerennial.

Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2009). Beyond big and little: The Four C Model of Creativity. Review of General Psychology, 13(1), 1–12.

 

3) I have been to China a few years ago and it seems to be growing and prospering. Is this attributable to leadership, education, or something else?

 

China is changing. Political scientists describe it as a highly adaptive communist regime, citing as influencers leadership (better known) and education (lesser known). Notably, measurable economic recovery is most evident in the rapid construction of cities, schools, and universities. Probably less well known, China has a capacity for creatively adapting in different domains of life. As examples, the Chinese government’s pursuit to effect change in education has introduced democratic components in mandates for teaching creative curriculum and in society through village elections.

 

However, conflicting with its growth and prosperity is China’s brain drain. The passive learner in China exhibits attitudes aligned not with creativity and hopefulness but rather with a view of education as passing examinations. Secondary students take the dreaded exam called gaokao, the outcomes of which decide their university fate and future. The all-consuming preparation for the exam comes at great cost, impeding students’ imaginations and creativities over an extended period. The brain drain phenomenon shows up in many ways—especially dramatic is its monumental exodus. The level of instability is so great that creative solutions are well behind it.

Not only relocating from rural areas to urban sites, many citizens have also left the country. Unprecedented, Chinese college-aged students and graduates, workers and families are seeking opportunities for success and a better life, many moving to Western countries.

 

4) Can you tell us a bit about the educational system in China now and how creativity fits in?

 

China’s exam-crazed accountability culture prioritizes learners’ rote-based memorization, so this can make it very difficult to imagine and observe creativity in schooling. I traveled to the other side of the planet to discover whether creativity occurs in such a culture and learned that it does. I directly experienced what I refer to as the “creativity paradox” in China’s elementary, secondary, and post-secondary schools while interacting with Chinese educators, leaders, and students. While I toured the schools, I observed that children and teachers alike expressed their creative selves by beautifying and personalizing garden spaces and caring for the environment by growing vegetables and raising fish. Creating artworks and robotics for competitions is common, as is performing dramas—always with their ancestral symbols (e.g., dragons) and traditions uppermost in mind.

 

In the course I taught on creativity in education, I greeted my undergraduate education students with lively Virginia bluegrass music. At first, they lacked the confidence to be creative. I held class in a theater, played the music and, before long, students began to express themselves. They felt confident enough to use microphones to present their projects on stage. These are but a few of the many examples of creativity witnessed. Despite the high-stakes accountability culture that drives much of schooling, there is surprisingly creative innovation and expression occurring, at least within the non-tested schools and tested schools I visited. Creative schools and models are also reported in the global news and a few publications.

 

5) Do the Chinese lean toward divergent thinking, or flexible thinking, or critical thinking, or higher order thinking? And who determines curriculum over there?

 

In China, creativity has become an important component of education since 2001. Its development is a main concern, with varying effects across the country. Hong Kong has been ahead of the curve in the nation’s work towards progressively implementing creativity in schools and colleges. Higher order thinking, a critical and creative skill, is being addressed in education policy and reforms. Acting on the priority for transforming societal institutions through creativity, policies have been changed. New practices are being implemented in preschool, primary, and secondary education.

 

In Southwest China, school principals (i.e., directors) and teachers of primary schools explained to me that there is no unified national curriculum. Their schools receive a guideline from the education department that they turn into a viable program. These early-grade teachers actually create their own curriculum using a team approach, all of which may be new information for many global outsiders.

 

In contrast, in secondary and college grades, Ministry-set general education curriculum, tethered to the competitive goals of international testing, dominates. Given this problem, you would not expect to encounter much, if any, work being done in the arts and humanities in high schools. However, this is not what I discovered at one highly ranked, prize-winning urban school in tested subjects. This school goes beyond tested subjects to incorporate the arts and humanities, and creative approaches to STEM, engaging students in well-rounded learning shaped around their individual interests. Teachers function as a close-knit team, implementing an interdisciplinary curriculum that keeps the arts and sciences at the forefront of learning. This school might be a petri dish of sorts for teachers’ creative experimentation with curricula.

 

 

6) Are there particular subjects that the government seems to foster in terms of creativity?

 

Aligned with high-stakes standardized testing, China, like the United States, is among the countries that credit language arts, math, and, science as core knowledge, but not the arts and humanities. The government wants its citizens to excel in the international tests, so that the nation’s scores are the highest in the world. In powerfully competitive test-centric countries, curricula (e.g., liberal arts, creative units in science) are eliminated to make even more time for tested subjects in schools. So, based on this curricular deficit, you can see just how remarkable are China’s creative teachers—those who rise above the rather impoverished received curriculum.

 

However, curriculum reform has occurred through such means as the catalytic 2006 policy document published by the Education Commission Hong Kong (2006). This has introduced liberal studies combined with languages (English and Chinese) and math, with curricular choice for students and examination structures that allow for options. The advanced grade levels such as high school seniors especially benefit. Hong Kong’s recognized liberal-oriented policy reforms have been taking off in Singapore and other parts of Asia, informing the more liberal direction undertaken in some areas of China. The crux of this movement is that it supports a comprehensive liberal arts curricular framework that combines languages and math.

 

Curriculum, set by China’s national government, is highly specialized; absent is a liberal arts education, as evidenced in its teacher education programs. Mastering the customary body of knowledge is what most university educators strive to do, not develop or teach critical intellectual skills.

 

Reference cited:

 

Education Commission Hong Kong. (2006, December). Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China’s progress report on the education reform (4): Learning for life learning through life. Retrieved from http://www.e-c.edu.hk/eng/reform/ Progress%20Report%20%28Eng%29%202006.pdf

 

7) Are there actual tests in China to assess creative growth or it is done by evaluation of products?

 

The most common method for assessing creativity, worldwide, is the assessment of creative products. In the global marketplace, the design and manufacturing of creative products is the usual frame of reference for the evaluation of such products.

 

Within the Chinese classroom, what we know about the evaluation of students’ creative products primarily comes from researchers. While this is an under-reported area of study, it evidences great potential. We know that students’ creativity in China has been evaluated by judges and through self-assessments intended to help learners better understand their own creative processes. Art and design education is particularly amendable to understanding creativity as both process and product, with positive results documented, such as by Chinese educator Tsai (2016).

 

However, Chinese learning environments and pedagogic instruction seriously limit students’ potential for creative innovation and expression. In Niu and Sternberg’s (2001) study, evaluators rated the creativity of Chinese and American college students, finding that the American participants’ artworks were more creative and aesthetic. The researchers identified pervasive restrictions in China that influence student creativity—these negative influences are the Chinese learning environment’s task constraints and the absence of directives to be creative. Similarly, Niu, Zhang, and Yang (2007) attributed performance-based differences between college students in the United States and Hong Kong to cultural influences. (The American participants were stronger performers in creative thinking based on creative writing and problem-solving tasks involving insight.) Interestingly, this line of research conducted on creativity in China transcends the Asian stereotype based on perceived genetics, characteristics, talents, abilities, or motivations.

 

References cited:

Niu, W., & Sternberg, R. J. (2001). Cultural influences on artistic creativity and its evaluation. International Journal of Psychology, 36(4), 225–241.

doi:10.1080/00207590143000036

Niu, W., Zhang, J. X., & Yang, Y. (2007). Deductive reasoning and creativity: A cross-cultural study. Psychological Reports, 100(2), 509–519. doi:https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.100.2.509-519

Tsai, K. C. (2016). Fostering creativity in design education: Using the creative product analysis matrix with Chinese undergraduates in Macau. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 4(4), 1–8. doi:10.11114/jets.v4i4.1247

 

8) The Chinese always seem to lean toward the arts—what about the realm of talent?

 

The arts and culture is one of the high growth creative sectors in China, although the industry sector that includes computing and other service sectors enjoys a much higher growth spurt. Creative industries are thriving, offering personalized, multi-functional music services and new products (as documented by Wuwei, 2011).

 

However, concerning the cultivation of creative talent, it is believed that China’s education has to break with tradition to establish new pedagogies and curriculum. Wuwei (2011) argues that youngster’s love of creativity and impulse to create needs to be supported in education through coordinated efforts with creative industries and other partners. Such relationships can propel new ways of thinking as well as majors and courses, and practical work and engagement with artists. Chinese universities named as innovators along these lines include Peking University.

 

Reference cited:

Wuwei, L. (2011). How creativity is changing China. New York: Bloomsburg Academic.

 

9) What have I neglected to ask about your book?

 

Springing to mind is the issue of unfortunate generalizations that are spread about China’s learners as robotized humans who lack creativity. China’s own government believes that its citizens are uncreative, meaning incapable of flexible and divergent thinking, or critical thinking, and higher order thinking. This deficit Asian stereotype is perpetuated in the global news and even published scholarship. Stereotypes interfere with what can be discovered about creativity in that rapidly evolving nation. In China, students do take their directions from teachers who in turn get their signals from authorities, all carriers of the regime. Given its millions of followers, it seems likely that Confucianism has reinforced allegiance to the nation’s government.

 

As such, Chinese students have had to become very good at tested subjects, sacrificing development in creative, open-ended problem-solving that defies linear study. However, it is nonetheless a generalization to assume that this student population is math-smart and creativity-poor, because creativity and innovation do exist in China’s educational and entrepreneurial sectors. I witnessed remarkable signs of creativity within different types of schools, including the under-resourced and impoverished among them. My new book Creativity and Education in China fully describes the teacher and student creativity I observed and experienced within its test-centric culture.

 

Reference cited:

Mullen, C. A. (2017). Creativity and education in China: Paradox and possibilities for an era of accountability. New York: Routledge & Kappa Delta Pi.

Contact info:

Carol A. Mullen, PhD
Professor, Educational Leadership
Virginia Tech
School of Education, VTCRC, Office #2014
Educational Leadership Program
Blacksburg, VA 24061
Email: [email protected]
Personal website: http://www.soe.vt.edu/carolmullen/