Pertinent Digressions


From 19 February 2012

Capital, Color, Curriculum, and Compromise: A Critical Evaluation of Kliebard’s The Struggle for the American Curriculum and Watkins’s The White Architects of Black Education

            Just a couple years ago, administrators at a Mesquite, Texas, middle school sent a boy home for wearing “skinny jeans.” His attire was in violation of the district’s dress code, which, incidentally, had been amended earlier that year to allow male teachers to grow facial hair. A repeat offender, the boy had previously allowed his hair to touch his eyebrows or reach below his ears, which also landed him in trouble. Frustrated—with the school, not with her son—the boy’s mother chose not to send him back: “We’re going to homeschooling,” she said.
            The drama in North Texas illustrates points made in two examinations of the shaping of American education up to the middle of the 20th century: Herbert M. Kliebard’s The Struggle for the American Curriculum (2004) and William H. Watkins’s The White Architects of Black Education (2001). One point shared in common among all three is the concept of dispositions, as described by Pierre Bourdieu.
            With regard to the boy in Texas, the school district’s dress code reflected a set of expectations shaped by the preferences of the district’s leaders and—except, clearly, for the boy and his mother—of the community as a whole. Sending the boy home was an overt shunning of the boy, a rejection of him and his skinny jeans as failing to exhibit the dispositions that ought to be the first-nature, unconscious preferences adopted as a matter of course among boys of a certain social group. Unfortunately for the boy, he was born into the wrong family—at least, as far as the district administrators are concerned. That is to say, he won’t be dating any of their daughters.
            The Texas case is a micro, simple, personal-level example of what Kliebard describes as having occurred on a national scale from 1893 to 1958. For, during this time, beginning with the presentation of a one-size-fits-all curriculum by the Committee of Ten (led by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, a mental disciplinarian who recognized the value of humanist learning and was not afraid of change per se) and ending with the passage of the National Defense Education Act (in negation of the anti-intellectualism of life adjustment education and in response to the unveiled threat of Soviet technological superiority as demonstrated by the successful launch and orbit of Sputnik), White men of means and pedigree and influence battled for the soul of the nation via control over the curriculum.
            Though some may call those White men “progressives” (note the little “p”), not all of the reforms advanced during this time were progressive in any sense of the word. Some, in fact, were actually regressive. But they were “reformers,” in that they repudiated in varying degrees the classical education of the 1800s, marked notably by the inclusion of Latin and/or Greek and the exclusion of anything one might call “utilitarian.”
            So, as mentioned, the subjects of Kliebard’s book shared an interest in curriculum reform, were White, and were educated at or associated with the very best institutions. This was not an eclectic collection of actors (except for Ward; see below). Not surprisingly, the sometimes-acrimonious clashes among them appear to us now to have been overheated discussions of nuance, rather than battles over irreconcilable systems of learning. How different could they have been? Let’s briefly outline the agendas of four competing interest groups, followed by a look at the man who chose not to get his hands dirty (although he encouraged the occasional soiling of the hands in the learning environment).
            We’ve already brought up the Committee of Ten, the mental disciplinarians who recommended the same humanist curriculum for all secondary students—college-bound and noncollege-bound alike. Their reasoning was that minor changes to the traditional curriculum would prepare all students for post-secondary life, regardless of the direction that life should take. Eliot, the chair of the committee, believed in offering electives, developing critical thought, and holding students to high standards: Said Eliot, “We Americans habitually underestimate the capacity of pupils at almost every stage of education” (quoted in Kliebard, p. 10). Having traveled extensively throughout Europe, interviewing teachers in all sorts of learning settings, Eliot had seen alternatives to the American system and had identified the benefits of some of the differences. Thus, he spoke with authority. And, with regard to the aforementioned dispositions, students schooled under such a program would, whether they graduated or not, at least be presentable.
            A sharp critic of the Committee of Ten’s curriculum was G. Stanley Hall, who did not share Eliot’s attitudes about pupils’ capacities to learn. Hall said that widely varying abilities meant that students would grow up to fulfill widely varying destinies. Thus, the “preparation for college is preparation for life” philosophy was, to Hall, a cynical attempt to force the colleges’ agenda on high schools. Hall was a developmentalist. Just as Eliot had studied European teaching methods, Hall had studied child development, interviewing children, taking “inventories” of their minds, finding out what they knew in order to find out what they were ready to learn. For Hall, it all came down to what the child was ready to learn, and the freedom to explore was a big part of child-centered, child-directed learning. And, just like Eliot, he spoke with authority.
            Today, we know the value of science. We measure what we treasure. We quantify, analyze, categorize, and organize. We’ve even learned, thanks to Frederick W. Taylor, how to “make a science” of performing a task, cutting away all that’s unnecessary and wasteful and getting things done quicker. The social efficacy interest group, represented here by Joseph Mayer Rice, applied these principles to education. More could be done with less, provided it was done more efficiently. Unfortunately, this meant that subjects that did not contribute directly to the employability of the student upon graduation and did not serve society (via industry) would have to go. And with regard to dispositions, these students would be fit only for what they had been prepared for, and social mobility would probably be severely limited.
            In 1917, there was concern in Congress that America was losing its agrarian heritage, yet was still unprepared to meet the needs of industry. Nationalism smoothed the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act, which was a boon to vocational education. With federal funding for industrial and agricultural programs in public schools, the social efficacy interest group had scored a coup.
            I think I would have liked Lester Frank Ward. Whereas anybody else with a nickel to their name saw natural selection as a great way to justify social inequality, Ward saw an abuse of a biological phenomenon applied to intelligent beings. As humans, we can be active agents on behalf of ourselves and others. We can intervene. We can counteract. We can nullify “survival of the fittest,” provided that the fittest are willing to lend a hand to the weak. This is social Darwinism turned social meliorism. Ward believed that equity in education could eventually lead to equity in society. Dispositions, in this case, would be less inhibitory because of the relatively “flatter” or horizontal arrangement of social groups. In other words, when we’re all equal, who cares about your intangible cultural capital?
            They say genius will always out, an awkwardly worded saying I take to mean that people like John Dewey, by virtue of their genius, will be recognized for it, despite their best efforts to confuse people by using established terms to mean totally different things. For Dewey, “occupations” are not jobs, but something more like “doings.” He would publish, subsequently think of improvements or corrections, and publish a new edition, only to find that everyone still cited the flawed original. This giant among teachers could not express his ideas clearly to practitioners. Consequently, a lot of the educators who thought they were implementing Dewey’s ideas were not at all implementing Dewey’s ideas.
Nonetheless, his reforms are significant, if underused. He chose the best of the interest groups’ ideas and adapted them to his own purposes. His was the vigorous hybrid, a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. Learners were active participants in their learning (a la developmentalism), but Dewey insisted on organized and coherent activities. And Dewey saw social efficacy as a means for maintaining the social status quo, whereas he wanted to improve society.
So who won? Who was the victor in the struggle for the American curriculum? Ultimately, elements of all four interest groups’ agendas made it through. Until the late 1950s, it looked as though the subjects were on the ropes. But nationalism came to the rescue, as it had for vocational education in 1917. The Soviets launched Sputnik, demonstrating that they had developed rockets that could deliver payloads—namely, bombs—from across the globe. Concerns that the United States was vulnerable to attacks from the Soviet Union fueled an intense interest in developing our future scientists. The result was the National Defense Education Act of 1958. It was safe for academics again.
**
The vigorous hybrid is a curious thing. A well-established, oft-demonstrated phenomenon, the very concept would have been considered impossible to the scientific racists described by Watkins. Then again, Watkins himself would have been considered impossible.
Oddly, it seems that many of the White architects of Black education were achieving the impossible: They reconciled the teachings of Christ with vast social and racial inequalities. They reconciled White supremacy with devoting their lives and fortunes to Black education. They reconciled Northern industrialists with Southern moderates. They reconciled democracy with apartheid. But all this reconciling was, in almost all cases, for the sake of expediency. To make the dollars flow. To keep the social structure as it was despite de jure equality. And it worked.
Watkins provides a fascinating look at the individuals who provided the ideological, political, and financial backing of Black education after the Civil War. Each architect is examined in turn, providing a mini psychological history for each. We see their backgrounds, their belief systems, their associations, and their flaws. More important, we see them as humans, not as caricatures, not as they would have been portrayed in the political cartoons of the day, with long noses and carpetbags, as “scalawags,” or as “worshippers of Negroes.” To be sure, however, they were indeed opportunists, pragmatists, nationalists, and zealots.
Watkins himself comments upon his surprise at finding humanity where he expected (and, perhaps, intended) to find evil people doing evil things. The results of these people’s efforts, however, are no less tragic.
Having expropriated incredible wealth from cheap labor in the North, the “philanthropists” sought to colonize the South, which would allow them to expropriate more incredible wealth from cheap labor in the South. With the war over, with the Freedman’s Bureau shut down, all that was needed was some way to maintain order as the industrialists developed the human capital wandering the streets and woods and fields of Dixie.
Government moves slowly, if at all. There are bills to write, majorities to be won, and bureaucracies to navigate. But individuals and the foundations they support or represent can act without permission or regulation or oversight, as long as those actions appear charitable. Philanthropists had an interest in tapping the resources—land, minerals, people—of the South, and they had the cash to do whatever was necessary to pursue that interest. They built the Black schools, and then pressured the states to invest in the White schools as well. Thus, the system of segregated schools was established by philanthropy.
As if going on safari, wealthy Northerners could tour the South by train, stopping by Hampton Institute to see for themselves how docile the Blacks were, how clean and orderly and disciplined and ready to work they were. More important, they could see that these young, docile Blacks were being molded into missionaries—not to spread religion, actually, but to spread docile Blackness. As teachers, Hampton graduates would, like missionaries, return home to convert their families and neighbors and communities and future generations of all of the above into docile Blacks.
In the economy of the missionary, the currency is salvation. Where there is no promise for salvation (they’ve already got that), there’s the promise of a better future through that most desired of all things among freed slaves—the ability to read and write. As Watkins (p. 181) says, “Education could offer promise, vision, and dreams in the absence of immediate material prosperity.” But for how long, one wonders, must those dreams be deferred? The short answer is, “indefinitely.”
We—by which I mean all of us, Black and White—are still reeling from the effects of the altruistic aggressions of the philanthropists. The schools they built established norms and models and traditions that have become entrenched in our educational system. For instance, Thomas Jesse Jones reported in 1908 that, at Hampton, the students learned “that beyond differences in physique, in economic possessions, and in literacy, there are other vital differences in the dispositions, in the mental characteristics, and in the social organizations of the races” (quoted in Kliebard, p. 108; emphasis added). Thus, Hampton students, most of whom became teachers, who in turn influenced future generations of Black teachers (until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, after which they were unemployed), were taught that they were not equal with Whites. And in “not equal,” we know that the implication is “inferior.”
The marginalia I scribbled in my copy of White Architects comprises multiple instances of each of the following: “natural order, ordained by God”; “political broker”; “expediency”; “God as racist”; “gradualism”; “compromise”; “contradictory”; “espoused vs. practicing beliefs”; “cf. Dewey, Contrary to Human Nature”; and “segregation = hierarchy + democracy.” Just typing those makes me feel dirty. I can’t begin to imagine how Watkins felt writing this book.


From 25 March 2012

Why Johnny Can’t Empathize: Language, Narrative, and Social Illiteracy in San Miguel’s “Let All of Them Take Heed” and Zimmerman’s Whose America?


            In the mid-1950s, an educational issue created a stir throughout the United States, and it had nothing to do with Soviet satellites. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It ignited controversy over illiteracy in America. The message was simple: Watching television encouraged children to use the “look-say” method of reading, which was too demanding. Flesch advocated an emphasis on phonics instruction to help kids learn to decode words by “sounding them out” according to the sounds associated with letters and letter clusters. The “look-say” method, however, asks the reader to focus less on within-word decoding and more on the context in which the word appears. This is more closely related to what we now call “whole language” instruction, which emphasizes the sense-making function of reading, relying on the interplay of phonics, meaning, relationships of strings of words, and context.
The experts still debate the relative merits of phonics against whole language reading instruction, and there appears to be a political angle: Conservatives tend to prefer the “back to basics” approach of phonics, whereas liberals maintain that the whole language approach’s focus on meaning is more conducive to comprehension. Neither side will concede, and the discussion has taken on the nature of an argument between adherents of opposing religious faiths. We’ll come back to this point momentarily.
            Flesch had gotten the nation talking about literacy. An article in Life magazine soon appeared, in which novelist John Hersey reported on his findings after reviewing the primers in use in Connecticut schools. In brief, he found the primers “antiseptic, … uniform, bland, idealized and terribly literal,” and wondered why they couldn’t feature illustrations more “like those of the wonderfully imaginative geniuses among children’s illustrators, Tenniel, Howard Pyle, ‘Dr. Seuss,’ [and] Walt Disney” (Morgan & Morgan, 1995, pp. 153-154). As it happened, the man who directed the education division at Houghton-Mifflin, William Spaulding, had worked with Dr. Seuss during the war. He contacted the author and challenged him to write an illustrated children’s book using only the 225 words on a prepared list. Thus was The Cat in the Hat born, released into the world in 1957 (Morgan & Morgan, 1995, p. 154).
            Among the many Seuss stories, “The Sneetches” stands out for its message against discrimination. Initially, the Sneetches with stars on their bellies think themselves superior to those without. When an entrepreneur with a star-adding machine supplies the plain-bellied Sneetches with stars, the original star-bellied Sneetches choose to have theirs removed. This is a common tactic. Once the plain-bellied Sneetches, through complicity and accommodation, had attained the very thing that had distinguished the superiors, the superiors chose to change the rules; what was once a distinction became the norm, and the superiors had to act to make it a stigma, to reassert their superiority.
Eventually, a series of star-addings and star-removals makes it impossible for the Sneetches to determine which of them had originally had stars. They realize in the end that it doesn’t matter anyway; they’re all the same underneath. Sneetches, it turns out, are smarter than people.
Caring little for stars, LULAC President and self-made entrepreneur Felix Tijerina sought instead to claim for his people the distinction of an equal education. In 1956, before The Cat in the Hat had first knocked on the door of those two unsupervised children, Tijerina had begun the search for resources for what would become known as the Little Schools of the 400. He ended up reaching into his own pockets to get the project going in 1957, and the positive results of the schools eventually won him government funding. The idea was a brilliant one: Through the Little Schools, Tijerina provided summer instruction to Mexican-American preschoolers who lacked any knowledge of the English language. Over the summer, the children learned the 400 English words identified by a seasoned teacher to be most important to students entering an English-only first-grade program in the fall.
The first Little School emphasized comprehension of those 400 words through frequent use. Since the words themselves had been selected for their applicability to the students’ lives—their selves and their families and their personal needs—it was easy to incorporate them into meaningful conversations. The results of this early example of culturally relevant pedagogy were dramatic: Whereas failure rates among other Spanish-speaking first graders were around 80%, that figure was 1.7% for the 60 alums of the Little School at the end of the 1957-1958 school year (San Miguel, 1987, p. 146). With the approval of state funding, the word list was expanded to 500—still a modest vocabulary, and the length of the program could vary per district, but would not exceed 60 days. The Texas Education Agency tested the students as if it were 2012. They found that, for the 1960-1961 school year, in which over 17,000 children had taken part in the summer-long Little School program, only 7% of the 17,000 were retained in first grade. Of the Spanish-speaking students who had not taken part in the program, 52% were retained (San Miguel, p. 157). I think the whole language people would claim this as a victory for their emphasis on sense-making in context.
But there were detractors. H.T. Manuel complained that 500 words were not enough.
I recognize that Manuel was angling for bilingual education, but Tijerina had not doctored the test results, and I doubt TEA would have doctored the numbers. And how many words would be enough? And at what point would the number of words to be taught require more intense study of individual words over the rapid, practical, conversational use and mastery of limited number, like 500?
Although not a perfectly matched analogy, let’s put this in terms of thinking levels in Bloom’s cognitive domain: Given the same amount of time (no more than 60 days), how many standards (words) could be taught before divergent thinking (mastery) has to be sacrificed, settling instead for convergent thinking (knowledge, comprehension). Or in terms of social studies instruction, how many names and dates have to be memorized before critical thinking, historical thinking, etc., have to be sacrificed? Let’s see what a 10th grader at an area high school (89% economically disadvantaged, 83% Hispanic) had to say about it:
Q: What is the hardest thing you’ve faced academically in high school? Why?
A: Social Studies, because I just never enjoyed it. It’s hard to memorize everybody’s name and what the dates are, the dates they did important things. Really the only dates I know are my birthday and my family’s birthdays.


What is this student’s perception of social studies? Is it drawing conclusions from a review of a variety of texts? Analyzing texts for authenticity? Judging the soundness of arguments? Recognizing and appreciating others’ points of view? Stating a point of view and defending it with evidence? No. His perception of social studies is memorizing names and dates, and he “just never enjoyed it.” And he likes math.
This is the point that Scottie made in class, that the standards are so bloated and so broad that there’s no time to actually do anything with the names and dates in depth. They’re not learned in any meaningful context. They’re bullet points.
But what’s the remedy? Cut down on the length of the list? Remove some of the names and dates? I will not be the one to raise his hand and suggest that! Who, then, would decide which names (and of which persuasions) to cut from the list, to remove from HISTORY? Or do we give states/districts/teachers/students the option to choose which groups or classes or races to study in their US History classes? No. I don’t think we want that—not because I’m for homogenization or assimilation per se, but because ignorance of the other is a form of illiteracy.
Literacy helps us communicate effectively. Cultural literacy helps us sound witty and pass exams effectively. Social literacy helps us be social—that is, be human—effectively. Without social literacy, we lack the perspectives and skills and (sometimes tacit) knowledge to appreciate others’ and our own roles in the larger community. The less social literacy we have, the more difficult it is to communicate effectively with those whose perspectives or appearance or needs are different from ours. Society doesn’t function; it dysfunctions.
Zimmerman (2002, p. 8) brings us back to our earlier point about arguments between adherents of opposing faiths:
A citizen who considers fornication an abomination before the Lord may have little to share—or even to discuss—with a sex educator who wishes to teach children about contraception. “What have you been reading?” a flustered New Jersey resident asked her state school board in 1980, blasting sex education. “I don’t understand you. I can’t even hold a conversation with you.”

This is an example of social illiteracy. They speak the same language, but she doesn’t understand the school board, can’t hold a conversation with them. Communication is impossible, and progress cannot be made.
The prevention of social illiteracy is a primary aim of social studies. And, as with many preventive measures, those most in need are least likely to seek or accept it—but they’ll demand it of others who don’t share their views.
            Examples of trying to restrict student access to alternative perspectives abound in Zimmerman. Consider the New York commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, who said in 1897, “There need be no diversity of views” (with regard to textbook analyses of the Civil War; p. 35). Or the Cold War complaint that Carl Becker’s text need not invite students to evaluate Russian Communism on their own: “If the American system was truly superior to the Soviet one …, why should schools let students ‘choose’ between them?” (p. 61).
However, the “experts” always seemed to be the ones who lacked the proper perspective, and irate citizens suggested that the experts get educated: “’I would suggest … you all go to Russia for at least five years,’ a citizen told California state officials. ‘When you return you can tell us truly if their way is better’” (p. 85). And only southerners knew the nature of the Negro. In 1905, Harvard historian Albert B. Hart was called out for being a “New England Negro-lover” (that’s how it got printed, anyway; p. 40). The plaintiff continued, saying
We know that the Negroes are an inferior race of people, We know that we have been taxed Millions of Dollars to educate him over the last 40 years, and we know that you can count on your fingers the men of a race of Nine Millions of people who have dome [sic] or said anything to impress itself on the reader of History fifty years from now… . Let the learned Doctor [Hart] go into the Blackest of the Black belt, and stay there two or three years, and when he goes back to the people who originally sold us the Negroes—the New Englanders—he will be better qualified to write of our troubles.

The “Negro-lover” did him one better. While at Harvard, Carter G. Woodson (a self-described Negro) studied under the same Dr. Hart. Woodson, the Father of African-American History and the impetus behind what is now Black History Month, went on to author textbooks in which he catalogued seemingly endless lists of inventors, painters, writers, etc., who had accomplished great successes in their respective fields—and who were Negroes.
The pity is this: Despite having written textbooks on Negro history, and despite the rapid sales of those textbooks—especially throughout the South—Woodson found himself “trying to sell the Negro to Negroes” (p. 47). Ironically, African-American teachers were not willing to embrace the African-American narrative, meticulously researched and lovingly written with a mind toward building up the esteem of the race without resorting to exaggeration or myth. A true, professionally produced narrative of incontrovertible accomplishments—more than the fingers on many men—worthy of interest to the reader of history, did not jibe with the best-educated African-American teachers in the 1920s and 1930s.
Why should this be? Perspective. These teachers, many of whom I have to assume were either trained at Hampton (or similar schools) or were students of those trained at Hampton, still carried the perspective of Negro inferiority taught them in the sociology classes designed to serve that very purpose. Though well educated, these African-American teachers were socially illiterate—about themselves.
REFERENCE 
Morgan, J., & Morgan, N. (1995). Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A biography. New York: De Capo Press.


From 11 May 2012

Do Well-Behaved Others Seldom Make History? It Depends
The Unsalvageable Hero, the Acceptable Hero, and the Anti-Hero
In a 2011 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, an author known only as “Female Science Professor” had this to say:
Not long ago, during a meeting of a somewhat prestigious committee, I openly disagreed with another committee member. He responded by noting that I was there only because "we needed a woman on the committee"—unlike the men, all of whom were apparently invited to serve because of their superior talents, wisdom, and experience. He was trying to undermine me, and, therefore, my argument. My response was to ignore his statement entirely and continue to make a case for my opposing view.
I have never particularly liked that "well-behaved women" quote that shows up on bumper stickers, although I appreciate its essential point: Women shouldn't just go along to get along, be quiet, avoid making waves, and so on. Sometimes you have to get out there and stir things up to make real change. The suffragettes made history by misbehaving according to the norms of their time, and we all benefited. . . .
Sometimes, apparently well-behaved women are being unconventional (and brave) just by showing up day after day, going to conferences, serving on committees, advising and analyzing and teaching, and basically just doing their jobs.
That philosophy is not unique to women; it has been applied to other situations in which people are initially uncomfortable with, or even hostile to, working with someone unlike themselves in gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation. In many respects, the pace of change—for tolerance and acceptance to be the norm—is unacceptably slow. Why are we still talking about how to treat certain types of people as intellectual equals? Perhaps that demonstrates that my win-with-niceness approach is a failure, or that it results only in insignificant, incremental change over any reasonable time scale.
As she points out, this has been the case with other Others as well. Loewen (2008) has determined from years of informal surveys that college students—except perhaps for those who have read his Lies My Teacher Told Me—do not know anything at all about Helen Keller’s adult life. They are generally aware of the fact that she overcame multiple physical handicaps with the aid of a dedicated teacher, but they are unaware of the important advocacy work she did as an adult. Loewen attributes this pervasive ignorance to the fact that Keller’s adult life and the accomplishments and contributions she made to the civil rights, labor rights, and women’s suffrage movements were tainted by her unabashed association with socialism. As Loewen points out, Keller, who also helped found the American Civil Liberties Union, overcame the obstacles of blindness and deafness in childhood only to be rendered mute by history textbooks. One wonders why she would be included in textbooks at all. As it turns out, she is not included in the 2010 edition of Pearson’s high-school United States History that I keep by my desk. Rather than add the important things that would make her historically relevant, the editors at Pearson simply deleted her altogether.
Of course, Bayard Rustin does not appear in the Pearson text, either. Why would he? Only a serious student of 20th century civil rights movements would even recognize the name of this man who got himself beat up and arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus (and, upon being bounced from his seat by the police, pointed to a white kid sitting nearby and said, “If I sit in the back of the bus, I am depriving that child of the knowledge that there is injustice here”; quoted in Amer, 2012). Who cares that Rustin organized efforts to protect the property of interned Japanese Americans, that he helped Asa Philip Randolph leverage a threatened march on Washington to “inspire” FDR to issue Executive Order 8802 (against racial discrimination in war industries and federal agencies), and helped Martin Luther King, Jr., form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference? Does it matter that he made the 1963 March on Washington happen, or that he convinced Dr. King to eschew all violence and embrace the nonviolent teachings of Gandhi (Rustin having travelled to India himself to learn by doing)? Apparently not. He was a Black Quaker, a communist, and an outspoken advocate of gay rights. He was jailed in 1942 for trying to teach that white kid on the bus about injustice, from 1944 to 1946 for violating the Selective Service Act, and in 1953 for homosexual acts (Hendrix, 2011). This walking civil rights lightning rod, despite exhibiting great courage and tactical talent, is not even mentioned in one of the most widely used high school history textbooks. He crossed too many lines; he was not well enough behaved to make (official) history.
In contrast, as noted by Martin Smith (personal communication, 2 May 2012), baseball legend Jackie Robinson made history as the first Black player in the major leagues not because he was the best, but because he had the proper disposition to serve as the ambassador of Blackness in America’s pastime. Robinson broke down a barrier, but he did not “cross the line”; he was well behaved enough to make history.
Robinson was an agent of change, and he made history. Female Science Professor does not mention being spat upon, cursed, struck, or having her life threatened, so it seems ridiculous to compare her situation to Jackie Robinson’s. Of course, females who integrated some industries were subjected to sexual harassment and overt physical threats, but that does not appear to be the case for Female Science Professor. The similarity being alluded to here is twofold: (1) Both are agents of integration, physically situating themselves in occupational settings in which they have not traditionally been and are not currently welcome; and (2) their intended degree of confrontation extends only to showing up and doing their job to the best of their ability.
Booker T. Washington made history, but he considered “the agitation of questions of social equality” to be “artificial forcing”—making trouble that need not be made (Washington, 223). Few of his contemporaries would have accused him of “making trouble,” but let us consider the possibility that Washington was a visionary. Let us consider the possibility that he was able to envision a time after his own, caring little about exactly how long after his own time, upon which “up from slavery” could be read to mean something akin to “up so far from slavery that one no longer associates him with slavery.” This vision—whether one chooses to interpret “vision” as “dream” or “foresight”—was and is the message of Christianity; be good now and reap the rewards of everlasting joy upon leaving this world. We have all read that this belief helped sustain many a slave through the pain of their present. So perhaps Booker T. Washington was visionary and self-disciplined enough to forego “making trouble” in exchange for setting up the conditions for some future payoff. He would be, as Audrey Thompson (2001) says, an agent provocateuse (facilitator of trouble) rather than an agent provocateur (maker of trouble). The hope, then, would be that the “trouble” in the future would be less explosive, less violent, less “agitating,” and “less forcing.” It would not appear to be anything like trouble at all, having come about so gradually, so naturally, and so peacefully.
Just as Jackie Robinson paved the way, just as Female Science Professor may be paving the way, Booker T. Washington paved the way, hoping that it would be smoother for those to come afterward. In the cases of Keller, Rustin, Robinson, and Washington, changes occurred and history was made in spite of the fact that all four were not in sync with their respective times. All four were ahead of their time, and the present is what it is to some degree because of their out-of-time actions. Keller and Rustin, however, are still not agreeable enough to be represented in full to schoolchildren, according to the editors at Pearson. It is, in some senses, easier to make history than to make it into history books.
The Inaccessible Hero
It is trite to say that change in education is slow; the grammar of schooling resists contractions and neologisms (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Time-saving tools and technologies are shunned, even if they offer enhanced efficiency, greater student engagement, and opportunities for transformational learning (Cuban, 1986, 2001). Reliance on textbooks is still strong, despite ready access to primary documents and other learning resources on the Internet. Consequently, little beyond what is in the textbook will be taught and learned in the classroom. The textbook is more important than it is intended to be; therefore, what makes it into the textbook is of great importance.
As noted by Zimmerman (2002), Carter G. Woodson was well ahead of his time as an author of what would eventually be called “Afrocentric” (Asante, 1991/1992) curriculum. Where Asante speaks of “centering” African-American children and of his having attended segregated schools in which he “had been nourished and nurtured by teachers who had mastered the nuances and idiosyncrasies” of his culture (p. 29), Woodson’s ASNLH had come to a similar conclusion in 1929 as a way of explaining why so many Blacks chose not to enroll in Negro history classes: “The Negro was suffering from an inferiority complex . . . [and] the best means of combating such was to inoculate him with a virus of the achievements of his own race” (Zimmerman, 2002, p. 46). Woodson himself considered the problem to be that Blacks had been taught to see themselves as inferior to a valorized White ideal and, therefore, unworthy of study.
Woodson’s situation was indeed perverse. He had written the texts himself, and he was eminently suitable to the task. White school boards were amenable to offering classes in Negro history and to using Woodson’s textbooks. Enrollment, however, was lower than expected. Is it possible that Woodson was guilty of the same set of assumptions that present-day textbook authors make—namely, that teachers and students are passive consumers of whatever texts are offered? It is possible that the teachers, as Woodson assumed, had been “mis-educated.” They certainly had been taught by the architects of Black education—most detrimentally as the result of the efforts of Thomas Jesse Jones via his Hampton Social Studies—that they were intellectually and socially inferior (Watkins, 2001, pp. 106-109).
It is also possible, however, that Black students were no more inspired by a “Negro pageant” than White students were by The American Pageant. That is, although Woodson found exaggeration of Black accomplishments contemptible (Zimmerman, 2002), he was not averse to drowning the student in a deluge of genuine Black accomplishments. The “virus of the achievements of his own race” might have been given in overlarge doses, resulting not in inoculation but in sickness. Today, we speak of relevance. Would any child of any color in Depression-era America have found relevance in a long catalogue of successful personages? What about those successful Americans? How did that famous and successful African-American inventor arrive at the understanding of that mechanism that helped him see a solution that would make that mechanism so much more efficient? In other words, what did Woodson do to make the heroes of Negro history any more human and accessible to Black children than were the mythologized heroes of White American history?
The Denigrated or Marginalized Hero
Even in the 1920s, Woodson had managed to convince some publishers of Eurocentric textbooks to remove some of the more egregiously racist and derogatory language. The NAACP and other ethnic groups achieved some success in this endeavor as well (Zimmerman, 2002). Just as important as the removal of the derogatory was the inclusion of the celebratory, although this was often realized as merely the mention of a nonwhite person’s name (such as Revolutionary “heroes”) or a special vignette set off in a box—literally “marginalized” or “inserted” into the text, but not in a way that actually affected the narrative in any meaningful way (FitzGerald, 1980).
FitzGerald (1980) found overwhelming constancy up until the 1960s, positing that counterculture influences caused people to become more contentious about what appeared in the textbooks their children used. Zimmerman (2002) points out that change had occurred all along, but that increased representation of people of color during and after the 1960s was the result of acts of Congress (for civil rights and immigration), adoption of Land of the Free in California, and the decrease in integrated schools (which increased the proportion of African American students in public schools) more than any “counterculture” factors. After the contentious textbook adoption process that resulted in California’s adoption of Land of the Free, Native American and Chicano citizens complained that the books left them out and overemphasized African Americans. These concerns were addressed to some degree in 1972 with the federal Ethnic Heritages Act, which apportioned funds to make curricula that more accurately reflected ethnic diversity (Zimmerman, 2002, p. 119).
Hunt (1966) reported on a conference of college and high-school history teachers (and representatives of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association) called specifically to discuss “the current ferment related to history and social studies curriculum” (p. 1). The situation described by Hunt was dire, and no consensus or recommendations were agreed upon during the three-day conference. Among the problems being faced, Hunt noted the following:
Illustrative of the impact of both the democratization of education and the expectations that schools provide for study of social problems is the need in Northern cities and in the South to educate many individuals from sub-cultures, for whom teaching resources and methods grounded in American middle class culture and standards are mostly irrelevant. (May I add quickly that not all of our sub-cultures are Negro, and that large numbers of Negroes do not belong to a sub-culture.) Transitional programs are essential before many of those whom we identify as educationally deprived can succeed in the kind of teaching-learning program that we have regarded as standard. (p. 5)
Other factors include a new emphasis on a “functional” curriculum [quotes in original], “critical thinking” [quotes in original], the need to include “some study of the history and social science of non-Western peoples and cultures,” the recent availability of audiovisual resources, and a plethora of paperbacks that will allow cheap reproduction of primary sources and a “release from the tyranny of textbooks” (pp. 4-9). Not surprisingly, “many thoughtful leaders . . . have urged the need for explicit attention to values: values in democratic societies sometimes contrasted with characteristics, if not values, in totalitarian societies” (p. 5).
Apple and Christian-Smith (1991) note that textbook controversies and changes occur at times of social upheaval, particularly since
they signify—through their content and form—particular constructions of reality, particular ways of selecting and organizing that vast universe of possible knowledge. . . .  Texts are really messages to and about the future. As part of the curriculum, they participate in no less than the organized knowledge system of society. They participate in creating what a society has recognized as legitimate and truthful. They help set the canons of truthfulness and, as such, also help re-create a major reference point for what knowledge, culture, belief, and morality really are. (pp. 3-4, emphases in original)
This statement, which is illustrated perfectly by Hunt’s notes above, is the curriculum-as-power, textbook-battle-as-proxy-for-larger-struggle-over-cultural-authority-America’s-soul argument, which is well represented in the literature (see, e.g., Blaut, 1993; MacMillan, 2008; Moreau, 2003; Parkes, 2011). Offering their own version of this argument, Aronowitz and Giroux (2000) state that
textual authority is both pedagogical and political. As a social and historical construction, textual authority offers readers particular subject positions, ideological references that provide but do not rigidly determine particular views of the world. As a pedagogical practice, the text has to be read not simply as a study in the production of ideology but as part of a wider circuit of power that calls into play broader institutional practices and social structures. In effect, textual authority represents the medium and outcome of a pedagogical struggle over the relationship between knowledge and power as well as a struggle over the construction and the development of the political subject. (p. 1843)
To Aronowitz and Giroux (2000), then, the text—the document itself—is an artifact or monument to the time, the society, and the victor of a particular culture war. Or, as in the case of the Hunt notes above, a snapshot of the belated mobilization of forces in a particular culture war.
Did Someone Say, “Culture War”?
Keith Barton (2012) reassures us that curriculum wars of the 1980s and 1990s and any associated concerns and hysteria have been blown out of proportion. The actual use—indeed, the stated goals and intent—of the National Standards for United States History: Exploring the American Experience (1994/1996) has been for voluntary reference only. The federal government cannot mandate that a school district (or a state, for that matter) abide by a set of national standards. Even if such a mandate were to be passed, it would be difficult to enforce, except through accountability measures, such as high-stakes testing. Barton assures us that little has changed in America’s classrooms as a result of the publication of the National Standards. In support of this assertion, Barton cites a study published by Catherine Cornbleth (1998), in which she observed teachers of U.S. history across a number of grade levels and found that “there was no observed extremism of any suasion” (Cornbleth, 1998). Cornbleth did report, however, that there was very little sustained discussion among the students about issues or alternative perspectives. The teachers offered “images” of America that were of either the “not perfect, but still the best country” (which had subthemes of “righting past wrongs” and “America’s underside”) type or the “different people might have differing, but valid views of events” type. In 7 of the 11 classrooms, students were not observed offering their own “images” of America. On several occasions, teachers actually shut down student-initiated discussions or sidestepped questions. Although Cornbleth did not rejoice in those findings, she seemed particularly concerned about some teachers’ use of “us” and “we”:
A final observation here is the tendency of several teachers to speak for "us," particularly to use "we" as if referring to all United States citizens and residents, or at least all of the students in the class. Whether unconscious habit or purposeful, this use of "we" seemed presumptuous to me, whether the teacher was speaking for the students or indicating more widespread agreement. It suggested a much more homogeneous America than was portrayed directly in several classes and than many (most?) people have experienced. (1998)
That was not, however, the final observation. She saved the best news for last:
Despite the warnings of self-appointed guardians of traditional United States history, such as former National Endowment for the Humanities director Lynne Cheney, and recently enacted conservative curriculum policies in states such as California and New York (Cornbleth, 1996b; Cornbleth & Waugh, 1995), our classroom observations and teacher interviews suggest that many teachers neither accept nor convey images of an unsullied, progressive America. The conventional story has been disrupted, and there is no equivalent successor in sight. This in itself, of course, may not be revolutionary. The changes are sufficient, however, to make conservatives uneasy and prompt young people to raise questions about the nation's past, present, and future. (1998)
That paragraph, copied in its entirety, raises a number of questions. The problem is not that it is taken out of context; it did not seem to fit in the original context, either. The questions are as follows: (1) Did Lynne Cheney warn that many teachers would accept and convey patriotic images of America? The Cheney–Cornbleth relationship will be explained below, but the explanation will not clarify why the former NEH chair is being mentioned. (2) Would one expect California’s conservative curriculum to have an effect on teachers in a district in the Northeast? The California–Cornbleth relationship will be explained below, but the explanation will not clarify how California’s curriculum guidelines are relevant to her article.
(3) After 20 pages of anecdotal evidence indicating that, over the course of a school year, (a) nearly two thirds of the classes failed to produce a single student-offered image of America; (b) three teachers stated biases or misunderstandings as historical fact; (c) there was a “near absence of recognition of individual and collective human agency”; and (d) teachers dodged questions, squelched debate, and abruptly changed the subject when they felt uncomfortable, we readers now know that—even if the young people are prompted “to raise questions about the nation’s past, present, and future”—those questions will not be discussed. The third question raised by that paragraph, then, is this: What self-respecting educator would imply via an article in Teachers College Record that there is anything in this study for educators to be happy about?
Neo-Nativists
As indicated by Cornbleth’s concern over the indiscriminate use of “we” and “us” in the classroom, she has a healthy respect for the power of words. Recall the excitement over the disruption of the traditional story of America, as evidenced by the halted, disjointed, and avoided discussions in the classrooms—“a disruption that challenges not only the conventional wisdom but also the privileged positions of those individuals and groups who have benefited from dominant ideologies and prevailing distributions of power” (Cornbleth, 1998).
Twenty years ago, Cornbleth and Dexter Waugh coauthored a paper that alternatively showcased Cornbleth’s academic critical multiculturalism and Waugh’s precise investigative journalism. The article, which appeared in Educational Researcher in 1993, was an insider’s look at how educational policy was made in New York (Cornbleth had taken part in the process of crafting New York’s One Nation, Many Peoples, the report that served as the basis for the state’s multicultural curriculum), as well as an expose of California’s processes for developing standards, adopting textbooks, and—the part that gained national attention—the development of the National Standards for United States History.
Despite both authors’ attention to language and sensitivity to labeling and assigning meaning to others, they characterized the California team as “a gathering of neo-nativists” (Cornbleth & Waugh, 1993, p. 85). The California team had indeed begun as a mostly conservative group: Lynne Cheney, then chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (which she later hoped to scuttle), cannot be accused of being a liberal—not then or since. It was she who granted UCLA’s Charlotte Crabtree the funds to establish the National Center for History in the Schools. Diane Ravitch, who dabbled in socialism as a young adult, was at this time a staunch conservative (though has recently had a change of heart). Ravitch had worked at the undeniably conservative Bradley Commission in 1986, which is how she was acquainted with Charlotte Crabtree, who was an education professor at UCLA.
Gary Nash had served as the faculty chair of UCLA’s Angela Davis Defense Committee. A well-established social historian, Nash had authored a multiperspective examination of colonial and revolutionary America titled Red, White, & Black: The Peoples of Early North America. For the introduction to the second edition, Nash wrote,
What is revisionist about a history that still measures all events of our past in terms of the values of the white society, that views American history through an Anglo-American lens, and that regards Indians and Africans in the colonial period as inert masses whose fate was wholly determined by white settlers? (quoted in Cornbleth & Waugh, 1995, p. 84).
Nash was Crabtree’s assistant director at the National Center for History in the Schools when she served on California’s Curriculum Commission in 1990. It was that year that the commission voted for the statewide adoption of Houghton Mifflin’s history textbooks for K-7. There was, however, a clear conflict of interest. Nash was one of four coauthors of the Houghton Mifflin series. One would have to be extremely charitable to dismiss this apparent collusion as an honest mistake. However, it would be incorrect to call Nash a “neo-nativist.”
It is unclear who came up with the neologism “neo-nativist.” Depending on how one views it, the word is either extremely clever or an embarrassing malapropism. For instance, Noam Chomsky followers are neo-nativists.
For those familiar with early childhood development, the connections appear to be everywhere: Jean Piaget coined the terms “assimilation” and “accommodation,” both of which are relevant to issues of acculturation, both for children and immigrants. One learns about the unfamiliar either by tying it to existing schema (assimilation) or by altering one’s existing schema to accommodate the new stimulus.
Most educators will recall something of Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development. These stages are like learning plateaus, each associated with a period of life. During each stage, the child is “ready” and equipped to attain certain concepts—one being language. This is where Chomsky comes in. Chomsky believes that children are born with universal grammar principles; they do not have to reach a particular stage to acquire language because the structures are built-in, ready to make sense of the words and idioms the child hears. Those who champion Chomsky’s innate universal grammar over Piaget’s stage theory have been called “neo-nativists.”
Chomsky’s analyses appear to fit nicely with the English language in particular, and the bulk of work done by linguists testing his theories has been in English. Findings from these analyses have, some linguists have complained, been unfairly applied to other languages, thereby foisting Anglocentric forms onto unrelated languages. This has been likened to British imperialism. Since Chomsky-school linguists have been associated with British imperialism and a preference for the English language, “neo-nativist” appears to fit here, too.
As the project to write the national standards got under way, it eventually became a consensus-building effort encompassing hundreds of people across the country, including academics, teachers, and other stakeholders, taking 32 months to complete. Over that time, a lot of changes were made. Cheney resigned. Crabtree retired, leaving Nash in command. A 300-page draft called Lessons from History went out for review to a broad council of stakeholders in social studies and was, on the basis of the feedback, deemed unsalvageable. Consequently, “when the Council decided to drop Lessons, William McNeill and Gary Nash were deputized to write a series of new organizing questions. . . . With social historian Gary Nash and world historian William McNeill leading the way, and with predominantly liberal academic historians providing the major content reviews, a new story line would soon emerge” (Symcox, 2002, p. 106). In other words, by the time the writing teams converged to begin work on the standards, anything resembling a neo-nativist influence had been sharply reduced. And before those teams had even finished, the hot part of this segment of the culture wars had begun.
Political and Personal
In the two years since the publication of Cornbleth and Waugh’s article, they had expanded the work and landed a book deal with Erlbaum. Also during that time, the mail office at Educational Researcher had gotten some responses on the original article. With multiple apologies for the time delay, the research editor of the journal explained that, within those two intervening years, “several AERA presidents, members of the board, the staff, and publications committee, the authors, and this editor were forced to consider important concerns about the role of academic journals, organizational responsibilities, legal concerns, and editorial prerogatives” (Ursula Casanova’s preface to Honig, Waugh, & Cornbleth, 1995, p. 22). Apparently, the editorial board was not accustomed to receiving six letters in adamant opposition to an article, in addition to two letters in support. They chose to print only one of the opposition letters in full, picking one they said contained all the important arguments seen in the others. Following the letter from Bill Honig, former California State Superintendent of Instruction, appeared a point-by-point “Response by Waugh and Cornbleth.”
Honig was clearly angry, taking the authors to task for writing a highly inaccurate account that contained “erroneous and malicious” characterizations
(p. 22). He then chastised them for the “neo-nativist” labeling and accused them of “trying to win points by engaging in revisionist history in the easier precincts of an academic journal” (p. 23). Honig addressed what he considered their primary complaints about the policymaking process in California and backed up his assertions with explanations of his rationale and excerpts from the framework. He revisited the “neo-nativist” dig again, pointing out that he and his team “vociferously criticized” the recent ballot initiative to keep immigrant children from attending school. He finished by pointing out that there were better ways to have “honest disagreements about relative emphases” than to resort to “personal invective”
(p. 25).
Waugh and Cornbleth’s response began with a thinly veiled comparison of Honig and his fellows as PC-bashing Klansmen, of the multiculturalism issue as the promise of a new Reconstruction, and Waugh and Cornbleth as the reflective narrator who, upon seeing the Klansman bash political correctness on television, realizes that when he himself tells PC jokes, he is jeopardizing the new Reconstruction.
Of the “neo-nativism” label, the authors claimed to be “surprised by the outrage. . . .”
We could have used another term, such as assimilationist, because we are portraying a late 20th-century version of the turn-of-the-century approach to dealing with immigrants—dissolve their cultural differences and absorb them. We continue to believe, however, that neo-nativist more directly captures the phenomenon that has arisen in recent years and that we encountered in our case studies, one that turns the standard definition of nativism practically on its head: Recognizing that immigrants have forever changed life, society, and the “culture” in places like California and New York, the policymakers we encountered now are embracing immigrants by announcing that “we are all immigrants”—including Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and conquered Mexicans. (p. 26)[1]
The authors then pointed out that Honig had employed such rhetorical devices as unsupported assertions, strawpersons created and attacked, and high moral ground and derisive discourse, presumably because his actual arguments lacked merit. There is some reference to the upcoming book (The Great Speckled Bird), and the letter ends on this note: “If our analysis of the politics of policy-in-the-making is to be disputed, it should be challenged directly, not obliquely with the kind of rhetorical Pecksniffery that Honig offers” (p. 27).
X & Y
Lynne Cheney, no longer affiliated with NEH, appeared on the MacNeill/Lehrer Newshour on 26 October 1994 to discuss the national history standards, which she had named as one of her crowning achievements during her farewell speech from NEH; the other achievement was Ken Burns’s The Civil War (Nash, Crabtree, & Dunn, 1998). She and the American people had been bamboozled.
Mr. Nash and his colleague, Charlotte Crabtree, really promised to deliver X, a version of history that was based on a document that they had already produced which is fine, one that I would be so happy to have my grandchildren learn from, and, instead, they produced Y, this document. (Cornbleth & Waugh, 1995, p. 192)
The X that Cheney was referring to was the Lessons from History document that the Center had sent out for review and ended up scrapping. She was not lying. The delivered standards—the Y—probably looked very little like what she’d seen a couple years before.
            Cornbleth and Waugh (1995) interpreted this in a reasonable, albeit unnecessarily nasty, way, pointing out that the neo-nativist network
was by no means a monolithic cadre. Rather, it was a loose gathering of academics, public figures, and political commentators from various positions and vantage points who shared the warmth of the campfire of ancient, celebratory nation-founding tales. The history standards that emerged from the UCLA project did not satisfy Cheney and perhaps others in part because they challenged the notion that there is a single history to be taught—illustrating once again that curriculum knowledge is continually contested.
(p. 193)
Add in a whole lot of public and private schoolteachers and remove the gratuitous troglodyte imagery and the description is a better fit. Of course the team was not a monolithic cadre. Making decisions and maintaining fragile consensus throughout the 32 months was not easy. This was a group of professionals whose interests converged for a time, and the core was built upon funding needs, clout, expertise, and previous working relationships.
            So far, the core team members have been content to allow others to speak on their behalf. The more egregious interpretations and characterizations of The Great Speckled Bird would eventually have to be addressed. Rather than address themselves to Cornbleth and Waugh, however, Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn (1998) wrote their account with a more general audience in mind. Despite the sensational title—History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past—the content of the book is simply an engrossing behind-the-scenes look at how to balance compromise, consensus, costs, committees, and loose coalitions in order to actually produce something.
            To what extent did The Great Speckled Bird affect what went into History on Trial? It would be impossible to tell without contacting the authors. All reference to the earlier text will, however, fit right here: “Another factor was the perception, way off the mark as it turned out, that both the Houghton Mifflin books and the curriculum framework were the work of a network of conservative and neonativist educators” (Dunn et al., 1998, p. 116). The accompanying endnote for that single sentence reads thus: “This argument was made, fervently but disingenuously, in Catherine Cornbleth and Dexter Waugh, The Great Speckled Bird: Multicultural Politics and Education Policymaking (St. Martin’s Press, 1995)” (Dunn et al., 1998, p. 290).
Can Well-Behaved Women Make (Academic) History?
A lot of great people have come and gone without being immortalized in the curriculum. Bayard Rustin and Helen Keller are simply too fascinating to be soon forgotten to history, even if they aren’t on required reading lists. Booker T. Washington left not only a physical, material legacy, but one that may right now harbor an asker of profound questions. And Jackie? You might want to ask Martin Smith about that.
Agency has come up here and there. Agency and alliances. These rely to some extent on access. There are barriers—both visible and invisible—that must be overcome as well. Some are structural, and some are psychological, but they are real nonetheless. Sometimes those barriers are ourselves, thanks to our own personal Thomas Jesse Joneses.
The paragraph below is from a review of Michael Apple’s Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age. The paragraph is a monument of sorts, an artifact, and its form and content are a representation of one person’s organization and perception and gathering and commodification of knowledge and power. It is history—or, at least, it is one person’s negotiation with history.
One crucial aspect is a countermovement to the conservatism that is Apple's focus, one that is minimized, most often by being acknowledged as "and so on." It is the continuing and still difficult coming of age and moving beyond our separate-studies ghettoes to appear onstage (with all that implies of surviving rituals of initiation) of previously marginalized female and racial-ethnic voices in the academy and, more slowly, in school curricula. Not to fully recognize such changes and their implications could be seen as participating in opposing them. This is less a matter of half empty or half full than of which or whose glass matters enough to examine. (Cornbleth, 1994, p. 37)
The preceding criticism leads one to consider the possibility that Cornbleth has been blogging under the screen name “Female Science Professor.” It is only a fleeting thought, though; this admonition to Apple could not have been written by the same agent provocateuse willing to settle for a “win-with-niceness approach” that might result “only in insignificant, incremental change over any reasonable time scale” (Female Science Professor, 2011).

[1] This final remark about immigrants is attributed to Joyce E. King in The Great Speckled Bird (1995, pp. 84-85). In the report on her field study, Cornbluth (1998) faults one of the Northeast district teachers for failing to make this very distinction.


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