John Dewey speaks to Brown: Research, democratic social movement strategies, and the struggle for education on equal terms

Teachers College Record

Volumn 107, Issue 9, 2005, Pages 2178-2203

  Rogers, John ^a   Oakes, Jeannie ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UC's All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity ^*

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 27844451954     PISSN: 01614681     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9620.2005.00588.x     Document Type: Review

References (106)

1. J. Dewey, "Democracy Is Radical" in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953, ed. J. A. Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 11: 299.
2. All references in this article to Dewey's writing are from John Dewey's collected works published by Southern Illinois University Press under the editorship of J. A. Boydston. Dewey's writing is collected in three series: The. Early Works 1882-1898, 5 vols.;
3. The Middle Works, 1899-1924, 15 vols.;
4. and The Later Works, 1925-1953, 15 vols.
5. We refer to these series in later notes as Early Work (EW), Middle Works (MW), and Later Works (LW) and list the volume number, the original year of publication, and the page number referenced.
6. Quoted in D. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fale of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), xiii.
7. See J. Oakes, A. S. Wells, Beyond, the Technicalities of School Reform: Policy Lessons from Detraching Schools (Los Angeles, 1996).
8. J. Dewey, "Liberalism and Social Action," LW 11 (1935): 64.
9. See, for example, E. D. Guba and D. L. Clark, "Levels of R & D Productivity in Schools of Education," Educational Researcher 7, no. 5 (1978): 3-9;
10. see also A. Hargreaves, A. Lieberman, M. Fullan, and D. Hopkins. The International Handbook of Educational Change (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2000) for comprehensive reviews.
11. See, for example, the list of services provided on the Equity Assistance Network Web site, http://www.edgateway.net/pub/docs/206.
12. For a brief history of the purpose and role of the Centers, see, B. Scott. "From 'DAC to 'EAC': The Expanding Role of the Equity Assistance Center," Intercultural Development Research Association Newsletter (February 1999), http:// www.idra.org/Newslttr/1999/Feb/Bradley.htm.
13. P. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Age and Practice of the Learning Organization (London: Century Business, 1990).
14. For a comprehensive review of this history of planned educational change, see M. B. Miles, "Finding Keys to School Change: A 40-Year Odyssey," in The International Handbook of Educational Change, ed. A. Hargreaves, A. Lieberman, M. Fullan, and D. Hopkins (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2000), 37-69.
15. G. Orfield, Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation (Cambridge, MA: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, 2001).
16. See, for example, D. Bell, "Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma," Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 518;
17. J. M. Balkin, ed., What "Brown V, Board Of Education" Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Landmark Civil Rights Decision (New York: New York University Press, 2001);
18. J. M. Balkin, "Would African-Americans Have Been Better Off without Brown v. Board of Education?" The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 35 (2002): 102-06. Note: Jack Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.
19. For a review of this literature, see J. Oakes, A. Gamoran, and R. Page, "Curriculum Differentiation," in Handbook of Research on Curriculum, ed. Philip York (New York: Macmillan, 1992).
20. See also J. Oakes and G. Guiton, "Matchmaking: The Dynamics of High School Tracking Decisions," American Educational Research Journal 32 (1995): 1, 3-33;
21. H. Varenne and R. McDermott, Successful School Failure: The School America Builds (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).
22. See, for example, J. Oakes, A. S. Wells, A. Datnow, and M. Jones, "Detracking: The Social Construction of Ability, Cultural Politics and Resistance to Reform," Teachers College Record 98 (1997): 482-511;
23. A. S. Wells and J. Oakes, "Potential Pitfalls of Systemic Reform: Early Lessons from Research on Detracking," Sociology of Education, Extra Issue (1996);
24. see also J. Oakes, K. Quartz, S. Ryan, and M. Lipton, Becoming Good American Schools: The Struggle for Civic Virtm in Education Reform (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000);
25. K. Weiner, Legal Rights, Local Wrongs; When Community Control Collides with Educational Equity (New York: SUNY Press, 2001).
26. For a compelling elaboration of this argument regarding merit and competition, see N. Lemann, "Rewarding the Best, Forgetting the Rest," New York Times, April 26, 1998.
27. See, for example, K. Brantlinger, Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School Advantage (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003);
28. E. M. Horvat, A. Lareau, and E. B. Weininger, "From Social Ties to Social Capital: Class Differences between Schools and Parent Networks," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Educational Research Association, New Orleans, April 2002;
29. P. Lipman, Race, Class, and Power in School Restructuring (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998);
30. M. Sapon-Shevin, Playing Favorites: Gifted Education and the Disruption of Community (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994);
31. A. Staiger, "Whiteness as Giftedness: Racial Formation at an Urban High School," Social Problems 51 (2004): 161-82;
32. E. L. Useem, "Middle Schools and Math Groups: Parents' Involvement in Children's Placement," Sociology of Education 65 (1992): 263-79.
33. For further elaboration of this argument, see J. Oakes and A. S. Wells, "The Comprehensive High School, Detracking, and the Persistence of Social Stratification," in A Future for the Comprehensive High School? ed. F. M. Hammack (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004).
34. The prevailing narrative of Brown has focused on political resistance to legal change. Far less attention has been paid to political resistance to educational change. Yet, that is the dominant story of the last 35 years. After legal resistance to integration broke down in the late 1960s, cultural and political barriers to equitable education have persisted and in some ways strengthened the hold of unequal educational practices. See, for example, Welner, 2001.
35. For more elaborated discussions of this point, see E. Brantlinger, Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School Advantage (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003);
36. J. Oakes, A. S. Wells, A. Datnow, and M. Jones, "Detracking: The Social Construction of Ability, Cultural Politics and Resistance to Reform," Teachers College Record 98 (1997): 482-511;
37. A. Staiger, "Whiteness as Giftedness: Racial formation at an Urban High School," Social Problems 51 (2004): 161-82.
38. J. Dewey, "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy," MW 10 (1917): 51.
39. J. Dewey, "Ethics," LW 7 (1932): 348.
40. J. Dewey, "Mediocrity and Individuality," MW 11 (1922): 289.
41. J. Oakes, K. Welner, S. Yonezawa, and R. Allen, "Norms and Politics of Equity Minded Change: Researching the 'Zone of Mediation,'" in International Handbook on Educational Change, ed. M. Fullan, A. Hargreaves, and A. Lieberman (London: Kluwer, 1998).
42. Often mainstream reforms actively worsen conditions for students who hold less powerful positions in schools and communities (e.g., new tracking systems, high-stakes testing programs, and so on), and sometimes students are disadvantaged by what is left out of reforms (e.g., repairing inadequate facilities, guaranteeing well-trained teachers). These are matters about which the research on reform has been almost silent.
43. These approaches to planned educational change are consistent with the prevailing industrial/technical model of schooling that focuses almost exclusively on schooling's instrumental role in producing academic achievement or workforce preparation. Even as the school change research and practices have come to understand the importance of cultural norms in facilitating or inhibiting reform, the focus has been on achieving a shared vision, developing norms of collegiality, or teachers' sense of efficacy - all thought to be part of the instrumental mix for improving schooling outcomes. So too is the case with considerations of the political dimensions of change. Even the most sophisticated analysts have focused most exclusively on the mircopolitics of change-that is, the battles over resources, authority, and status within schools that often accompany efforts to change educational practice - and attended little, if at all, to the larger political dynamics of equity-focused change.
44. As we noted at the outset, conventional strategies are based on knowledge diffusion and planned educational change theory mostly borrowed from the business world. They typically separate the substance of the reform (teaching methods, school reorganization, and so on) from the processes by which educators learn about the reform and believe in it ("buy-in" or "or-ganizational learning"). They often take ongoing financial and policy support for granted. They promise a payoff in increased achievement, with little further analysis broached about the long-term sustainability of such achievement, the value of the achievement, the opportunity costs of pursuing one achievement vis-à-vis other positive outcomes with the available time and resources, and possible differential benefits with the greatest value going to traditionally well-served students. When experts deliver or disseminate knowledge, when they train or "in-service" school personnel, or when they design packaged programs for schools or other experts to follow, there is little incentive to ask or listen to troublesome critiques such as these. There is nothing inherently offending about being an expert and having expertise, and the knowledge of experts exists for others to use. Our pejorative use of "expert" here refers to particular reform relationships that are based on power and authority and exist outside a public sphere where civic participation, information gathering, exchange, interpretation, and debate can take place.
45. Welner, 2001.
46. J. Dewey, "Ethics," LW 7 (1932): 350.
47. Dewey notes that the lack of such material conditions is a prime contributor to illiteracy. See, "The Sources of a Science of Education," LW 5 (1929): 314.
48. J. Dewey, "The Sources of a Science of Education," LW 5 (1929): 297;
49. "The Economic Basis of a New Society," LW 13 (1938): 320.
50. J. Dewey, "Philosophy and Democracy," MW 11(1918): 53.
51. H. Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 180;
52. H. Putnam, "A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy," Southern, California Law Review 63 (1992): 1683.
53. J. Dewey, "The Sources of a Science of Education," LW 5 (1929): 297.
54. J. Dewey, "Philosophy and Democracy," MW 11 (1918): 53.
55. J. Dewey, "The Public and Its Problems," LW 2 (1927): 339.
56. J. Dewey, "Ethical Principles Underlying Education," EW 5 (1897): 59.
57. J. Dewey, "Emerson - The Philosopher of Democracy," MW 3 (1903): 190.
58. Dewey wrote this quote in his essay on Emerson, but, as Cornel West argues, it speaks broadly to Dewey's central concern with democratizing knowledge. See C. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 75.
59. J. Dewey, "Democracy and Education," MW 9 (1916): 16.
60. J. Dewey, "Democracy and Education," MW 9 (1916): 326.
61. J. Dewey, "Education as Politics," MW 13 (1922): 331.
62. J. Dewey, "Sources of a Science of Education," LW 5 (1929): 313.
63. J. Dewey, "The Public and Its Problems," LW 2 (1927): 340.
64. J. Dewey, "The Public and Its Problems," LW 2 (1927): 364, 367.
65. J. Dewey, "The Public and Its Problems," LW 2 (1927): 364.
66. J. Dewey, "The Public and Its Problems," LW 2 (1927): 344.
67. D. Morris, "'How Shall We Read What We Call Reality?': John Dewey's New Science of Democracy," American Journal of Political Science 43 (1999): 619.
68. In the inimitable words of Cornel West, "Critical intelligence is available to all peoples; it is neither the birthright of the highbrow nor the property of the professional" (97).
69. J. Dewey, "The Public and Its Problems," LW 2 (1927): 365.
70. J. Dewey, "The Public and Its Problems," LW 2 (1927): 364.
71. This warning and the subsequent discussion on the role of experts served as a direct rebuttal to Walter Lippmann's democratic realism. In language that evokes Lippmann's text, Dewey spoke of how, in recent years, society had come to be dominated by a new class that claimed to rule "not in virtue of birth and hereditary status, but in virtue of ability in management and of the burden of social responsibilities which it carries, in virtue of the position which superior abilities have conferred upon it" (LW 2, 362).
72. J. Dewey, "The Public and Its Problems," LW 2 (1927): 362, 363.
73. J. Dewey, "The Public and Its Problems," LW 2 (1927): 364.
74. In his conclusion to The Public and, Its Problems, Dewey argues that "It is outside the scope of our discussion to look into the prospects of the reconstruction" of publics (368).
75. Similarly, he closes his other major work in political philosophy, Liberalism and Social Action, by noting, "It is no part of my task to outline in detail a program for renascent liberalism" (64).
76. J. Dewey, "Setting New Goals at 70," LW 6 (1931): 407;
77. "Is There Hope for Politics," LW 6 (1931): 188.
78. J. Dewey, "Is There Hope for Politics," LW 6 (1931): 230;
79. "Address to the NAACP," LW 6 (1932): 182.
80. J. Dewey, "Is There Hope for Politics," LW 6 (1931): 188;
81. "Help for Brookwood," LW 6 (1932): 328.
82. "Help for Brookwood," LW 6 (1932): 328, Ibid. Such political education, he argues, offers more hope than efforts of "social agencies" in "'character-building' or 'faith-restoring.'"
83. "Help for Brookwood," LW 6 (1932): 328, Ibid.
84. J. Dewey, "United, We Shall Stand," LW 11 (1935): 350.
85. J. Dewey, "United, We Shall Stand," LW 11 (1935): 350, Ibid.
86. J. Dewey, "Social Change and Its Human Direction," LW 5 (1930): 364.
87. J. Dewey, "The Meaning of Liberalism," LW 11 (1935): 364.
88. J. Dewey, "Social Change and Its Human Direction," LW 5 (1930): 346.
89. J. Dewey, "Freedom and Workers' Education," LW 5 (1928): 331.
90. J. Dewey, "United, We Shall Stand," LW 11 (1935): 352.
91. J. Dewey, "The Economic Situation: A Challenge to Education," LW 6 (1932): 130.
92. J. Dewey, "The Teacher and the Public," LW 11 (1935): 162.
93. J. Dewey, "United, We Shall Stand," LW 11 (1935): 350.
94. J. Dewey, "United, We Shall Stand," LW 11 (1935): 350, Ibid.
95. Cornel West contrasts Dewey's standpoint with Marx, who "theorizes from the vantage point of and in solidarity with the industrial working class of nineteenth-century Europe - an exploited, unfranchised, and downtrodden people" (70).
96. J. Dewey, "The Teacher and the Public," LW 11 (1935): 158.
97. Our argument here follows Cornel West's sympathetic, but critical reading of Dewey in The American Evasion of Philosophy.
98. F. Polleta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
99. Ganz, 2001;
100. see also K. Bobo, J. Kendall, and S. Max, Organizing for Social Change: A Manual for Activists in the 1990s (Santa Ana, CA: Seven Locks Press, 1991);
101. R. Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America (New York: Macmillan, 1994).
102. See, for example, J. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990);
103. R. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
104. P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1970).
105. J. Anner, Beyond Identity Politics: Emerging Social Justice Movements in Communities of Color (Boston: South End Press, 1996).
106. J. Dewey, "Democracy Is Radical," LW 11: 299.