4 Chapter 4 – Cognitive Development and Schooling

Adolescents spend a significant percent of their waking hours in school and pursuing academic accomplishments unlike youth in previous generations.  who worked and contributed to the maintenance of their family unit.  Thus, it is important to examine the growth of cognitive capacities in youth and its interactions with other aspects of their lives.  As in other areas of youth life, there are numerous frameworks that attempt to explain cognition and academic performance.  We will explore the major issues in this arena from different disciplinary perspectives and how experts attempt to explain the phenomena we observe around us.

In the last few decades the dominant framework used to explain cognition has been a biopsychological one.  Other perspectives often were either used to support or dispute the major assumptions about cognitive development, the most important one being that all cognitive functions have their roots in the brain and therefore all development can be traced to changes in the structure and the function of the brain.

 Anybody who has had sustained interactions with teens today would notice the deep impact that technology has in teen lives and their academic engagement.  Teachers complain that cell phones intrude with the learning process in class. They note that students use cheat sheets, unacceptable resources online and seem incapable of the deep analytical thought that is needed to produce substantive written work (Määttä, Herrgård, Saavalainen, Pääkkönen, Könönen, Luoma & Partanen, 2005; Matthew,2017).

It is unclear how the introduction of digital technology has affected youth’s capacity to attend to singular topics with focused concentration. Researchers like Sherry Turkle from MIT claim that digital technology and the increasing incidence of multitasking has affected people’s capacity to do deep analysis and processing of information (Fischetti, 2014).  Studies demonstrate that doing several tasks at the same time or attending to several sources of information simultaneously, leads to poor performance in each of those tasks individually.  There is much recent research focusing on exploring the limits of multitasking with newer forms of available technology.  Thus, while adolescents often perceive themselves as capable of completing several tasks equally well, research suggests otherwise (Cain, Leonard, Gabrieli & Finn, 2016).  The challenge for teachers today is to facilitate learning in spite of digital distractions while at the same time using digital media to communicate and assess (Edutopia, 2012)  student learning (Cheong, Shuter & Suwinyattichaiporn, 2016;Taneja, Fiore & Fischer, 2015).

Classroom instructional methods have not changed in the last three decades in a fundamental way.  While students are increasingly being immersed in technology, they have made little impact in the instructional methods in classroom.  In general, there is a fear around the use of technology in schools.  However, it is important to contend with the ubiquitous role that technology plays in children’s lives today. In fact, the successful introduction of technology early on in a young person’s life is a key factor in later academic success.  The uneven introduction of technology has led to children from wealthier families having an unfair advantage in terms of having ever expanding opportunities in the new work environment that involves sophistical technological skills. Technology use is the norm in wealthier school districts around the country and its role is not limited to a specialized topic or program but is interwoven into the learning process (Monahan, 2004).   One of the major challenges to facilitating access to technological knowledge is a lack of infrastructure support like high speed broadband connections, as well as the hardware needed to go online Madeline Harbaugh, 2016).

In some schools, every child’s education is customized based on their goals and their achievement levels. Each student is offered their own individualized training programs (sometimes known as playlists) so they can progress at their own pace and not have to compare their achievement with other students (Dunlop, 2014). Playlists are like individualized textbooks except they are digital. Thus, technology allows for mastery learning where everyone exhibits success. The instructor then has the chance to offer special instruction to students who need the teacher’s help. Having technological devices available to students throughout the day also allows for teachers to experiment and try new methods of imparting information. Students could work in groups or in pairs attempting to learn the material or produce new knowledge while the teacher moves from one student to the next assessing their learning.  Access to technology allows for collaborative learning and assessment using platforms like google docs where joint writing is possible (Nowell, 2014).  It is possible for students to listen to expert lectures live via programs like skype or google hangouts.  It facilitates organization and being more connected to important events and issues inside and outside of school.  However, critics have pointed out that not everyone has access to these technologies and the long-term impact of these technological devices has not been studied (Xiaoqing, Yuankun & Xiao Feng, 2013).

For some researchers, the capacity for interaction between students, between students and expert others and between students and machines is central to the inclusion of technology in the classroom. Student participation in class and outside can be facilitated using technology. For example, students from a school in one country can talk to students online in another, thereby allowing for cultural and language learning by both sets of students.  When classrooms are equipped with appropriate technology it is possible to bring in speakers from around the world lecturing on topics of global significance with the opportunity for students to interact with the speakers.  Thus, technology makes it possible for students to take their learning beyond the traditional classroom contexts to the community and the world (Ferreira, Herdman, Curtis, Chia, Poe, Thompson & Biwu, 2012).

In summary however, the issue of the introduction of technology in the classroom has been fraught with controversy.  In surveys, teachers fret that their students are easily distractible, and teachers must be entertainers in order to keep students’ attention focused. At the same time, there is an acknowledgement of the ease with which students can conduct research online and have access to information that a generation ago would not be accessible to students (Howard, Nicholas, Hayes & Appelt, 2014). The latter unfortunately is a double-edged sword because learners are often confused about what makes for legitimate sources of information.  The outcome is that students either become skeptical of all information, having surrendered their critical thinking skills to a vague relativism or seek information that confirm their preexisting biases (Greg & USA, T., n.d).

In the segment we will look at the history of schooling in the US as well as the current context of education.  Access to schooling as well as the experience of being a student has changed dramatically over the last 150 years in the US.  As with other institutions like healthcare, the family and the criminal justice system, there have been debates and discussions whether schools as institutions have been a force for positive change or whether they keep communities in the margins oppressed with little access to power.  We will examine the factors that contributed to current educational structures and the changes they have undergone in recent years.

A Brief History of Schooling in the USA

The first public schools were started in Massachusetts to teach children how to be responsible members of the community. Most of the educational practices in the USA were home-based with wealthier families arranging for private tutors. By the mid-1600s, schooling was made compulsory for all European origin boys.  Students of all ages were usually in one room under one teacher (Vinovskis, 1987). Starting in the mid-1700s, girls were also offered access to public education starting in New England though it was believed that they only needed to learn to read and not to write.  In the years following the American Civil War, the first schools supported by public taxes was established. Newly freed Blacks were offered an education, but it was in segregated schools.  In most rural and impoverished areas, schooling did not extend beyond elementary school and schools for Black children received little funding at all levels. It was not until after the second World War that high schools became widespread and most of them were publicly funded.  Public schools vastly outnumbered private academies of learning (Butchart, 2010).

Initially, most teachers did not have much training and were women hired from local families. The situation changed with the setting up of normal schools which specialized in training women to be teachers and by the early 1900s, most teachers were trained in these schools.  Horace Mann became the secretary of education in 1837 and he did more than anyone else at that time to bring about standardization in the training of teachers as well as the curriculum taught in schools for students of all ages (Boston History, 2014).  He believed that education involved imparting civic virtues and character building and not simply training in a trade. He also introduced age-wise grouping of grades where a cohort of same-aged students would go through the grades together (Jürgen, 1999).  The first Black schools were established after the civil war and they were inspired by a zeal for justice by a few social reformers.  They were convinced of the need to educate the newly freed slaves. Most of the teachers were white while about a third were Black. The schools were segregated and often went underfunded (Russ & Harris, 1994).

In the early 1900s John Dewey, a professor of philosophy in Columbia College catapulted into prominence when he wrote extensively about the need to teach students about democracy and social transformation along with content-related knowledge.  He emphasized the importance of social consciousness in the development of individual character and touted its primacy in becoming fully educated (Solomon, 1999). By then however, most schools were entrenched bureaucracies that believed in traditional education and thus there was little movement towards change and transformation.  Since most of the educational policy makers and administrators were middle class professionals, they were averse to challenging the status quo within educational institutions. They did however move to make teaching more professional and brought about innovations in schools building arrangements and teaching methods. Between 1910 and 1940, there was a dramatic increase in public high schools and the populations that were being served by these institutions. In 1940, over 50% of adolescents were enrolled in public high schools, one of the highest proportions in the world. While the elite in Germany and France had access to publicly funded education, they lagged in enrolling less well-to-do students.  American schools also departed from their European counterparts in offering much more local control of educational institutions which were also funded with local taxes.  In the 1920s and 1930s, teachers’ unions began to be established to represent teachers and provide opportunities for professional development. Today the largest teachers’ unions are National Education Association (NEA) which mostly started as an upper middle-class organization and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) which had working class roots.

Public Schooling and Equity

The United States spends almost 40 % more than other advanced countries on education and yet has a larger gap in achievement between groups with privilege and groups that have been underrepresented historically. In the next few decades as the number of students of color are expected to grow exponentially, the problem is expected to be exacerbated. Some of the gaps in achievement can be traced to the home and neighborhood contexts where children come from. Children of color, especially Black children are read to less than other children, they have fewer educational opportunities in their early childhood and demonstrate fewer skills that prepare them for academic success in schools.  Black students are more likely to be held back when data from all the grades are examined.  There is little research that demonstrates the effectiveness of holding back students and in fact some studies show that it is damaging to their long term success in school.   Black students are also more likely to be pushed out of school before they graduate. At the same time, while Black and other students of color enjoy fewer learning opportunities, they have few role models in the form of teachers and administrators who share their background and history. Almost 80 % of public high school teachers are white.

On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court in a landmark case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas outlawed segregated schools for the first time in US history (Cantero, 2008). Today however, public schools are more segregated than they were before the ruling. The reasons relate to the differential economic status of Black and white families and consequently where the family could afford to live. Since the 1970s, courts have released school districts from desegregation obligations because of white resistance and the higher costs of integrated education.  Black, Latinx and Native youth tend to be concentrated in areas that are high in poverty, where schools are underfunded and where fewer teachers are certified.  The consequences of the continuing segregation of schools by race (and therefore social class) is that students are not exposed to a diversity of cultures, heritage and thought; this leads to shortchanging our students in terms of enriching experiences that the school environment can provide.

Similarly, in the area of bilingual education, the fear of an unassimilated immigrant population dominated educational policies in the USA throughout the last century. Learning and communicating in more than one language was not encouraged as it was thought to lead to divisiveness and unpatriotic behavior. Before World War I President Roosevelt in a speech referred to some areas of the country as ‘polyglot boarding houses’ that are likely to dent national unity and identity (Ramsey, 2010). Until 1974, the ideal of language unity by national leaders led to “English only” curriculum in schools.  However, at the local level because of local control of schooling, when there was a concentration of immigrants in an area, schools were able to offer language choices to residents. Similarly, Native reservations were able to exert some control over language learning. With increasing governmental pressure and progressive educational reform, educational curricula became increasingly standardized in the second half of the 20th century leading to other languages only being offered as an elective. In addition, after World War II, with the increase in non-white immigrants in the country, former European origin citizens who wanted to retain their native language from their countries of origin switched their preferences and wanted “English only” Education to be implemented.

The New Assaults on Schooling

From 1910 to 1940, there was a massive transformation in the public education system; it went from catering to the elite to one that was open to most citizens. Secondary school attendance jumped from 10% to 70% of all US children.  Like with any other social institution, there are many layers and narratives of power that are played out in schools between administrators and teachers, between teachers and students, between faculty and staff and between students themselves. Also, as in the case of other social institutions one of the main functions of schools is to play the role of a sorting device that is reproduced in the larger context outside of schools (Giroux, 2017).

There is fierce debate in the US about whether schools are instruments of social mobility in which any student can excel through meritocratic achievements or whether schools simply reproduce the inequalities in a society where children are trained through school practices to behave in accordance with their social class.  The first viewpoint is called a functional perspective while the latter is termed conflict approach (Kerstetter, 2016).  People in the functional camp would argue that the technological demands on the workforce today is huge and education helps students equip themselves with key skills that make them more marketable. The conflict approach views the rituals and pedagogic practices in schools as favoring students from families that are culturally, socially and economically privileged. From the topics that are taught and assessed, to sports that are funded and encouraged, middle- and upper-class children experience a stream of success from their early years of school to when they finish high school leading to increased autonomy and professional readiness for children of privilege (Nash 2010).  In addition, there is a constant chipping away at the self-esteem by reducing the subjective experiences of people from historically underrepresented groups to simplistic monolithic understandings that eliminate the complex differences within the groups. One example would be using the term ‘the Muslim world’ to refer to a large swathe of territory that spans the globe – even though the beliefs, rituals, practices, as well as the cultural and political life of groups in the region are vastly complex and different within.

Children from families with privilege bring with them cultural capital which are ways to navigate the complex rules involved in school success in addition to the knowledge that is needed to be academically proficient. There is evidence that from Kindergarten to high school, poor and working-class children lag middle- and upper-class children in academic achievement (Payne, 2013).  After each summer break from school the difference in achievement between both groups grow a little bit larger with each passing year. Researchers believe that the extra educational experiences that middle- and upper-class children receive over the summer leads to the increasing gaps in achievement between poor students and their wealthier counterparts (Entwistle & Alexander, 1992). By the end of the high school years poor children are several grades behind middle class children in both reading and math (McGee, 2013).  In more recent years, critical literacy experts claim that the purpose of schooling has been subverted to reflect the dominant values of free market fundamentalism. Trends in modern liberalism (neoliberalism) aims to transfer resources from the public to private hands. In this form of social organization individual rights are valued more highly than collective good, the wellbeing of private corporations is given more weight than the workers who work in them and citizenship is equated with commercialism (Harvey, 2011).

Critical literacy theory encourages learners to adopt a critical perspective to all texts and attempt to uncover the subtext that is embedded in any written or spoken knowledge.  It encourages readers to ask, “Who benefits from certain ‘truths’ that are imparted by institutions and who loses?”  Current arrangements in schooling promote the interests of groups that already have power in society according to critical literacy experts.  They claim that schools have stopped being spaces of social transformation and empowerment and children are simply being taught to be compliant workers and avid consumers (Johnson, 2006). In the new neoliberal era, the frameworks of schools reflect market values and extreme individualism with students pitted against each other in destructive competitiveness. In a neoliberal society, citizenship has been equated with consumerism with little space for democracy, community and justice.  The dominant values of schooling thus inculcate extreme apathy to the social context in students.  In a time when there are few jobs with appropriate benefits, when wages are stagnant, when unions are being busted or prevented from being formed, the job of the educator according to critical literacy experts is to create opportunities for students to practice radical democracy and facilitate the growth of critical literacies in their students (Barlow, 2006; Johnson, 2006).

One of the ways in which corporations and individuals with power have responded to the growing agency of groups that have been historically underrepresented is to create an audit culture for public schools that requires expenditure of resources on bureaucratic rituals that include meaningless assessments that give little information that is of value, and data collection that consumes inordinate amounts of educators’ time. To stifle conversations about agency and democracy, books have been banned by school districts, especially if they make forays into spaces that are considered dangerous by those in power. For example, in the Tucson school district in Arizona, Chicana books are banned as un-American (Gershon, 2017). The craft of teaching has been reduced to one of techniques with little connection to real lives and questions centered on the context of children’s lives (Giroux, 2011).

Critical pedagogy experts criticize school arrangements today as ‘dead zones of imagination’. Conversations are bound by narrow disciplinary interests and rarely bridge the gap between schools and the everyday experiences of students.  Bourdieu (1992) characterizes this kind of education, symbolic violence on the population (Cheryl Reynolds, 2013). According to Bourdieu, when people are forced to engage in institutions without being provided with appropriate tools to negotiate the environment, it is a form of violence.  As members from historically underrepresented groups began to demand more access to the construction and dissemination of knowledge, there was a backlash from the elite who have a lot to lose in terms of both power and resources if radical democracy is practiced in educational institutions. Positioning white, male, upper-class, heteronormative frameworks as truth and demeaning other ways of conceiving of knowledge as social justice or political correctness allows entrenched power to dismiss these other epistemologies (ways of knowing) as inferior (Giroux, 2014).

Critical literacy theory asks that readers ask who benefits and who loses when some texts are considered ‘truths’ and others not, and through current arrangements of schooling (i.e., its funding source, organization and rituals etc.)

In 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was passed in the Congress. Its ostensible goal was to improve the quality of education for children coming from backgrounds of disadvantage. It required states to punish schools that were not meeting goals set by standardized tests developed in individual states.  The federal government was to play a bigger part in public education by having annual tests and teacher accountability. Schools were required to have annual reports about academic achievement in their schools and communicate the results to the public.  While proponents of the NCLB Act pointed to the improved test scores of children since it was implemented, critics emphasized the shifting, lower standards in different states that had demonstrated improvements. Critics charged that teachers were forced to teach to tests instead of teaching student’s problem-solving and critical thinking. In addition, subjects like the Arts and Music suffered because schools wanted to expend resources on subjects that were going to be tested. Schools were held to absolute standards of performance and thus even when students were making progress, they were labelled as failures and punished by having funds taken away from them.  Many states with failing schools lowered their standards to demonstrate improvement among their students thus defeating the purpose of the Act. In 2015, most of the provisions of the NCLB Act was retracted (Resmovits, 2012). But the notion that the nation can measure its way out of school failure remained.

The NCLB was replaced in 2009 by the Race To the Top Act (RTTT) which rewarded states for innovation and reform in education. It aligned in principle with many of the provisions of the NCLB, emphasizing evaluation of teachers, encouraging charter school growth and establishing common performance standards for students. In order to be competitive many states increased their cap on charter schools and adopted common standards (The Common Core). The RTTT Act has had critics who have leveled similar objections to this Act as they had to NCLB – common assessment standards weaken education and are not accurate for all populations, increasing federal control is inappropriate for locally governed schools and that the reforms have not been proven to work in the past (Sustar, 2012).

Schooling and Privatization

Since the 2008 financial crisis, an increasing array of public services have been taken over by private equity firms and corporations (Dodge, 2011). This action by many countries in the world sometimes called structural adjustment – the notion that governments are inefficient and private entities can perform the job better. Some examples are libraries, water providers, prisons, healthcare and increasingly, K -12 education. When a public service is taken over by a private company, the chief goal is maximizing profit.  That often means that the most experienced workers are laid off, those who are left must work harder, their benefits are gutted, and people who use the service are charged for it.  The results are often that the clients do not get appropriate services, and the workers in the industry suffer losses in the quality of their work environment accompanied by higher profits to the corporation that has been outsourced to take over the industry

There has been an enormous move to privatize public education in the last two decades. It goes under the euphemism of reform. The initiators of the reform movement are mostly hedge-fund managers, educational corporations, and religious organization. Their one mantra has been that public education is a disaster in the USA and only privatization and school choice can change that.  They have pushed this message in state legislatures across the country in the last two decades. States have responded with a range of laws that allows for vouchers for private schools and religious schools even though in some states there are laws on the books that prohibit public taxpayer dollars from being used to fund religious or non-public schools. This movement has been accompanied by other laws that facilitate the growth of charter schools and the closing down of failing schools that do not meet standardized requirements (Ravitch, 2010; Ravitch, 2013).  The idea of a charter school was conceived by Albert Shanker a teacher himself, but his idea was to have them be managed by the public-school system and not by private entities. They were to provide alternative modes of instruction and initiate experiments in education with fewer bureaucratic involvement.  Shanker has distanced himself from the direction that the modern charter school movement took.

Public schools do not enjoy the benefits that charter schools enjoy. The former must take in all students including students with severe disabilities and students who speak English only as a second language (Erickson, 2011). Charter schools can be selective and push out students who might ruin the reputation of the school. Charter school workers are not unionized, typically working long hours and they do not enjoy the benefits that public-school teachers do (Noguera, 2014). There is a high turnover rate among teachers in charter schools. One of the earliest and the largest corporation dedicated to privatization was Edison which was started by a man named Chris Whittle. The endeavor was heavily funded by wealthy patrons who were convinced that privatization of public schools was here to stay (Farber, 1998). However, mismanagement and poor student performance led the share prices of Edison to drop from over $38 a share to 14 cents a share. Today it goes by the name EdisonLearning, Inc and has moved away from managing charter schools and instead has diversified into producing and distributing school supplies like tests and tutoring.  Similarly, another non-profit organization Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) has initiated a large-scale movement to start charter schools. While it has managed to survive, its critics point to a large teacher turnover rate and the funds funneled into it by private foundations sympathetic to privatization (American School & University). It has the advantage of being able to remove students who do not meet its standards of behavior and performance.

In many states today charter schools operate with little oversight and make enormous profits for the corporations that run them (Rich & Bennett, 2014. Robelen, 2007). The movement has now grown to include online platforms as well. It is unregulated and unaudited, and investors find ways to make a profit off these schools, even though the results have been generally lackluster in terms of student attendance.  Currently, there is no provision offered by states to shut these schools down if there is evidence of non-performance or mismanagement (Ramanathan & Zoller, 1999).  In most states, charter schools lack transparency and accountability and they drain funds from public schools (Paino, Renzulli, Boylan & Bradley, 2014).  While the research community is clearly concerned about this trend, legislators have been overwhelmingly friendly to charter schools and it is set to see unprecedented growth (Knaack & Knaack, 2013).

The institution of schooling has a deep and enduring impact on the experience of adolescence around the world. There are biological factors in the form of brain development and neuronal growth that make youth uniquely equipped to deal with abstract academic subjects. They have an increased capacity to pay attention to information that helps solve problems. They can think critically about their own thoughts and approach learning in a scientific manner.  Their lack of experience however leads to decision making that are error prone. Within the larger cultural context, our society has undergone enormous changes in how adolescence is perceived, how youth are disciplined and the kinds of work environments that are open to young workers. The neoliberal environments that schools are situated in has reduced opportunities for transformative experiences for young people within educational institutions. Schools are being privatized at an unprecedented rate and standardized assessments are being proposed as a cure for educational issues. All these forces have shaped the experience of schooling in the USA for children of all ages but especially for youth of color and poor adolescents. They are increasingly being criminalized and punished for trivial infractions using exclusionary discipline that pushes them out of high schools. The new educational reforms that involve a testing regime and opening of charter schools using tax payer funded resources have made educational institutions even more an instrument of inequality.  Critical literacy theorists propose that only a democratic and critical space within schools can allow for true learning for all students.