Progress Illinois

If you want to peer into the world of right-wing school reformers, Sol Stern would be a good guide. For almost a decade, this Manhattan Institute senior fellow has contributed articles about education reform to City Journal, the neoconservative urban policy magazine funded by the same free-market think tank. And for the past three years, Stern has made it his intellectual crusade to discredit a teaching pedagogy about which he seemingly understands very little. The latest iteration in a long line of articles (and an upcoming book) is his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning titled "Ayers Is No Education 'Reformer.'"  An excerpt:

In fact, as one of the leaders of a movement for bringing radical social-justice teaching into our public school classrooms, Mr. Ayers is not a school reformer. He is a school destroyer. [...]

The readings Mr. Ayers assigns to his university students are as intellectually diverse as a political commissar's indoctrination session in one of his favorite communist tyrannies. The list for his urban education course includes the bible of the critical pedagogy movement, Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"; two books by Mr. Ayers himself; and "Teaching to Transgress" by bell hooks (lower case), the radical black feminist writer. [...]

America's ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children (and particularly the children of new immigrants) into a common civic and democratic culture is already under assault from the multiculturalists and their race- and gender-centered pedagogy.

Having spent time reporting from a social justice education conference, visiting multiple classrooms where teachers employed the technique, talking to over a dozen people highly involved with the work, and then writing a feature article about the burgeoning movement, I can decisively say that the pedagogy Stern decries is by no stretch of the imagination "a school destroyer." When applied correctly, it can engage urban students long alienated by mainstream methodologies.

At it's heart, social justice educators emphasizes dialogue while remaining attentive to each student's social environment, something standard approaches to youth development work often overlook. By taking kids' lives as a point of departure, teachers are by no means indoctrinating students politically. From my piece:

Successful social justice education ensures that teachers strike a balance between debating sociopolitical problems that affect children's lives and teaching them academic basics on which they will be tested. A science teacher can plant an urban garden, allowing students to learn about plant biology, the imbalance in how fresh produce is distributed and how that affects the health of community residents. An English teacher can explore misogyny or materialism in American culture through the lens of hip-hop lyrics. Or as Rico Gutstein, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, suggests, a math teacher can run probability simulations using real data to understand the dynamics behind income inequality or racial profiling. These are "examples of lessons where you can really learn the math basics," he says, "but the purpose of learning the math actually becomes an entree into, and a deeper understanding of, the political ramifications of the issue."

In America, the earliest major example of social-justice based education was the Freedom School movement of 1964, a group of grassroots institutions Stern would be hard-pressed to call unpatriotic. Yet it's easy too tarnish the entire approach (and Barack Obama simultaneously) because it's one Bill Ayers has supported.  Keep that in mind when reading his critique.