Edutopia - April/May 2008 - (Page 47)

oMaxine Greene Philosophy meets public education. grew up in a family that discouraged intellectual adventure and risk,” Maxine Greene wrote in a 1998 autobiographical essay. “To me, the opera and the Sunday concerts in the Brooklyn Museum Sculpture Court and the outdoor concerts in the summer were rebellions, breakthroughs, secret gardens. Since the age of seven, of course, I was writing.” Of course. Maxine Greene has written seven books and too many prefaces, articles, and essays to count. She has been an editor of myriad volumes on the philosophy of education, curriculum, arts education, social justice, literature, multiculturalism, and—well, the list goes on long enough to convince anyone that Greene had to start at the age of seven to get all of this done. One would have to have almost been born literate to accomplish what Greene has, and there are many who would say she was. Others call her one of our most important educational philosophers. But she doesn’t take herself too seriously: At the beginning of a phone interview she quips, “I hope I can be civil and sane.” And, indeed, she manages to be both, with generous helpings of elegance, thoughtfulness, and erudition thrown in for good measure. Now ninety, Greene, president of the Maxine Greene Foundation for Social Imagination, the Arts, and Education, is still a professor of philosophy and education at Columbia University, where she has taught for more than forty years. She also presides over regular literary salons that are video- I taped and can be viewed on her foundation’s Web site. Some of the books Greene and her group have discussed include Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and numerous others. Greene also is philosopher-in-residence at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education, as she has been for some three decades, and she continues to lecture there and host literature as art workshops. Indeed, she seems to have lived and breathed teaching and education for much of her life. Obviously a deeply reﬂective person who has spent long hours thinking about ideas, she seems compelled to share her knowledge. How, in our accelerated society, Greene is asked, do we convey to students the importance of personal reﬂection? “I’m very inﬂuenced by existentialism and the thought that you can be submerged in the crowd, and if you’re submerged in the crowd and have no opportunity to think for yourself, to look through your own eyes, life is dull and ﬂat and boring,” she says. “The only way to really awaken to life, awaken to the possibilities, is to be self-aware. “I use the term wide-awakeness,” Greene adds. “Without the ability to think about yourself, to reﬂect on your life, there’s really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious.” Her passion for literature, art, and education is a constant theme in her conversation. “I’m absolutely opposed to strict standards, and I’m terribly interested in kids having conﬁdence in their own vision,” she says. “There is no right way to make art.” oMichelle Rhee DC supe tackles grave issues. ichelle Rhee, who became chancellor of the Washington, DC, schools last June, is tackling a job that has vanquished six school chiefs in ten years. Her monumental task—to rescue one of the nation’s most troubled education systems—is one she assesses very bluntly. “We have a massive challenge here,” she said in an interview on National Public Radio. “If you M look at what we are facing right now, and the achievement gap we have in this city, it is unacceptable.” For example, Rhee says, the differential between the city’s white and African American students, as illustrated by their SAT and Advanced Placement test scores, has reached “hundreds of points.” And the problem, she says, is the school system, not the students. The city’s African American students, Rhee says, are not getting the quality of instruction they deserve. She believes those scores can rise signiﬁcantly, but it is the job of the adults in the school system to see that they do. Rhee, a Korean American (thus the district’s ﬁrst nonblack chief in many years) is young— thirty-eight—and has never run a school district, but she has come into the job like a well-focused whirlwind. Some of her initiatives, such as school closings, have been controversial, but her straightahead, can-do and will-do style has won legions of converts to her cause. Rhee began her career as a Teach for America teacher in second- and third-grade classrooms in Baltimore. In 1997, she founded the New Teacher Project, which made its mark nationally with an innovative approach to placing thousands of new teachers in low-performing urban schools in cities across the country. In Washington, Rhee already is a making a major impact on the 50,000-student, 144-school district by putting in place methods for tracking student achievement, as well as teacher and principal accountability. She’s also instituting new policies that will hold her and her staff responsible for how students perform. As Rhee told NPR, “For far too long, we have failed to deliver the quality of education that our students deserve—and no one had ever been held accountable for that. The only people that were suffering the ramiﬁcations of public schools were the kids, and those days have to stop.” Rhee’s intensity, courage, and determination are impressive, to say the least. She is committed, she says, to showing people that the district and all its personnel care about the individuals— both parents and students—whose lives and futures are affected every day by what happens in the city’s classrooms. In an interview last November, Rhee said, “On the weekends I’m in the grocery store . . . and people come up to me, and they say, ‘Thank goodness you’re doing this. You can’t do it quick enough. Don’t give up.” She says, emphatically, that she won’t. EDUTOPIA.ORG EDUTOPIA 47 http://EDUTOPIA.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Edutopia - April 2008

Edutopia - April 2008 Contents Up Front Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of the Class Cool Schools Design Reinventing the Big test The Daring Dozen Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Jack Prelutsky

Edutopia - April 2008

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