live the questions now

Pedro Noguera is a thinker in education who has done a lot to influence my own understanding of urban education and sociology. I read his work in grad school, especially as it relates to school violence in New York City, and have heard him speak several times over the past few years. Sometimes his words really stay with me (I’ve often remembered his use of the expression, “you don’t blame the corn when the corn don’t grow” in regard to student achievement) and sometimes they feel tired, and I need a reminder that it might not be his words that are tired so much as my ears are of hearing the same things over and over. So, for the benefit of those who haven’t heard Noguera’s message, my notes from his talk last week at the Asia Society National Forum are below (thanks to Jon Becker for nudging me to live blog it!).

I was refreshed by Noguera when I tried to listen from the perspective of that particular audience – primarily educators and policymakers who are reimagining school through the lens of global education. It is of massive importance that we don’t reserve global learning as such a precious thing that only the rich kids get to participate in and benefit from it.

So, here they are, with a few of my own reflections in italics:
* 50% of African American males in NYC are unemployed (in what age group, though?)
* anti-immigration sentiment in US means that many teachers are working with students whose parents are treated like fugitives
* most secondary teachers confuse teaching with talking, and are bad teachers because they imitate the worst teachers of all: college professors. Teachers think if they’ve covered it, therefore the kids learned it, not based on what the kids can do (band and shop teachers know this)

* most of what kids learn in school they will forget, except what they continue to use
* what matters most is how well you have learned to learn and solve problems and process information; need to prepare students for the creativity and innovation sector of the economy
* how can education cultivate imagination?
* soft bigotry of low expectations: Bush is right that this is a problem with schools (even if he doesn’t know what it means)
* the education of poor children is approached based on what will be on the test (art and music aren’t integral to learning for ‘those kids”)
* we”ve forgotten that Dewey was writing about the whole child 100 years ago; Gardner: through the 1960s, most kindergarten teachers knew how to play the piano and had one in the classroom
* why do kids say school is boring? Because it is.
* research shows that interactive learning is good for retention of knowledge. It is traditions and low expectations that keep us from changing pedagogy.
* suburban schools are more diverse than urban schools, but are segregated from within
* the gatekeepers deny “low expectation” kids opportunities for rigorous learning
* algebra as predictor for going to college
* all the countries that are “ahead of us” in international test scores do things we don’t do: they provide universal access to health care (“you can’t teach kids to read if they can’t see”), to preschool
* Montessori schools were founded for poor children in Italy but are usually exclusive to affluent children in the US
* school system lacks a sense of trust in children
* schools and teaching still assume that intelligence is innate and the function of schools is to sort and rate based on intelligence — we need a new paradigm that cultivates all kinds of talent in all children. Need to reorganize our schools and our expectations.
* need to honestly ask how strong a predictor race and socioeconomic status are on academic success (in the current paradigm)?
* what happens to kids who have no adult advocates in schools? The kids who don’t know they have rights?
* confidence + competence = resilience. kids need the chance to actually get good at things (this means we have to give them space to be bad at things at first, and then get better)
* discipline needs to mean cultivating character, not weeding out bad kids (because now “discipline and punish” happens due to unmet needs and we don’t acknowledge that)
* ASCD Commission for the Whole Child (“ASCD”…can never remember what that stands for”) — seems like a common sense idea, but “common sense isn’t all that common”
* how do we challenge the conventional wisdom of the old paradigm?
* PS 138 in the Bronx has the only museum of the history of the Bronx — striking that historical artifacts are within reach of children who could destroy them, but students have pride and ownership over the museum so it would never occur to them to do anything but respect it — school culture is one of respect and leadership
* if you let race and class be predictors of student success, that is the school’s problem, not the kids”.
* for most gifted children in urban environments, their “gift” is having parents who advocate for them and make sure they”re prepped to pass the tests that get them into gifted programs.
* one way to close the achievement gap is to speak out against the known ways that students are prevented from learning, and against the underlying conditions of inequity.