Educating a Democracy

Meier, D. (2000). Educating a Democracy. In J. Cohen & J. Rogers (Ed.), Will Standards Save Public Education (pp. 3-31). Boston, MA: Beacon.

Meier discusses the challenges we face as a democracy when we are tyring to educate our students through the guise of a standards based instruction. With the current role of high-stakes testing in our public school system, Meier argues that this approach is not the best approach to educating thoughtful citizens to participate in public discourse and our democratic government. Meier pulls from her experiences working in the schools of Boston and New York to comment on the importance of trusting teachers and reforming the way we as a society, view education. The article is broken up into various sections that cover the history of standards in education, the “crisis” we face, alternative models of assessment, and closes with the importance of educating a democracy.

I had read the Will Standards Save Public Education back when I was in college before I had entered the classroom and was struck by the ways that the public viewed my soon to be profession. I thought, and hoped, that this perception of education would have changed by the time I entered into the profession. Re-reading the article provided me with the reassurance that educating our students is about compassion, respect, responsibility, and care. While one cannot measure the success of these with a standardized test, they are the cornerstone of what it means to be an educator.

• “By shifting the locus of authority to outside bodies, it undermines the capacity of schools to instruct by example in the qualities of mind that schools in a democracy should be fostering in kids--responsibility for one’s own ideas, tolerance for the ideas of others, and a capacity to negotiate differences.” p. 5
• “Virtually all discussions, right or left, about what’s wrong in our otherwise successful society acknowledge the absence of any sense of responsibility for one’s community and of decency in personal relationships.” p.13
• “The largest districts and the largest and most anonymous schools are again those that serve our least-advantaged children.” p. 14
• “In a world shaped by powerful centralized media, restoring a greater balance of power between local communities and central authorities, between institutions subject to democratic control and those beyond their control, may be vastly more important than educational reformers bent on increased centralization acknowledge.” p. 19
• “All we need is a little more patient confidence in the good sense of “the people”-- in short, a little more commitment to democracy.” p. 31

The Magnificent Eight: AVID Best Practices Study

Guthrie, L. F., & Guthrie G. P. (February, 2002). The Magnificent Eight: AVID Best Practices Study. Retrieved from:http://www.avid.org/dl/res_research/research_magnificenteight.pdf
Guthrie and Guthrie are members of the organization CREATE (Center for Research, Evaluation and Training in Education), which was funded by the AVID center in 2001 to complete a study of the program’s best practices. The report presents the program essentials of AVID in section one and in section two presents the program essentials at a collection of eight schools. The eight schools, also known as the Magnificent Eight, were selected based on their “consistent high performance by AVID students.” All of these schools are in the state of California and most work to implement all eleven of the program essentials into their schools. It is important to point out that this report was funded by AVID and the schools that were selected were the high achieving AVID schools.

Based on the report, the AVID program seems to be useful to schools that have a system of tracking students and helps students “move up” in that tracking. AVID has also been very successful at getting students to college, especially minority students, and keeping them there. The skills and strategies taught to the AVID students seem to prepare them for the rigor of a college preparatory curriculum and helps to teach them to self-advocate and ask questions. Students who are “middle” achieving apply to be a part of the program. The AVID participants, and teachers, generally volunteer to be a part of the program. AVID sees this as one of the cornerstones to student success-- teacher and student buy in. The report does not give specific strategies that are used in the classroom, but instead studies what made these AVID schools part of the “magnificent eight.”

• “All the programs reported this essential was indispensable; teachers and students must volunteer for the program.”
• “AVID students make up nearly 50% of the students in AP at Ramona, even though they represent only 20% of the total student population; at Coachella, they account for 30% of AP, but only 6% of the school enrollment.”
• “The strength of AVID lies in putting writing as the foundation, and providing students access to trained college tutors who guide students toward critical thinking.”
• “In the groups, we saw students unafraid to ask questions or to question others; they were learning to assess their own understanding, developing an awareness of what they knew, not only in their reflection at the end of the period, but throughout.”

Reflection on Practice:
I am interested to learn more about the specific strategies that AVID teachers use in their classroom. I would also like to see if there were ways to bring the “AVID elective” into my core classes. From reading the report, I can see the various ways our model is similar to the program, but also ways in which the model is very different. A next step would be to review the curriculum and activities to see how they are used in a class.