Sigal Ben-Porath

Citizenship under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict

Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Citizenship in Wartime 9 CHAPTER 2: Education as War by Other Means 33 CHAPTER 3: Peace Education: Anger Management and Care for the Earth 57 CHAPTER 4: Feminist Contributions to Expansive Education 76 CHAPTER 5: Multicultural Education: Acknowledgment and Forgiveness 93 CHAPTER 6: Expansive Education 113 Notes 131 Index 151

Tough Choices: Structured Paternalism and the Landscape of Choice

Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1: To Choose or Not to Choose? 1 Chapter 2: Why Paternalism Is Good for You 18 Chapter 3: The Regulation of Intimacy 43 Chapter 4: Paternalism toward Children 66 Chapter 5: Exit with Caution: On Culture and Choice 89 Chapter 6: School Choice as a Bounded Ideal 123 Conclusion: Structured Paternalism and the Landscape of Choice 144 Notes 153 Index 175

Civic Virtue Out of Necessity: Patriotism and Democratic Education

Should patriotism be considered a legitimate part of schooling in a democracy? This question has been contested in the scholarly literature as well as by policy-makers for decades.Terrorism and conflict exacerbate this debate by adding a sense of urgency to both the demand to love thy country and the concern for individual freedom. In this article I suggest that the social circumstances of conflict substantiate the claim for teaching patriotism in schools, while maintaining a strong commitment to their democratic educational mission.While patriotism should be regarded as a civic rather than a moral virtue, its contribution to solidarity and to endurance in wartime warrants the attention of educators, scholars and education policy-makers. The implementation of patriotic teaching should thus be incorporated into the broader democratic vision which public schools should endorse and with which they should engage the next generation of citizens.

Deferring Virtue: The New Management of Students and the Civic Role of Schools.

The expectation that schools resuscitate civic virtues and create a vibrant civic and public sphere competes with a more powerful contemporary demand on schools, namely, that they generate equal opportunity and mobility, especially for poor and minority youth. This equal opportunity is framed solely in the context of grades on standardized tests. The effort to improve the educational achievement of youth from underserved communities is undertaken through strict behavior management practices, particularly in charter networks that are seen as more successful. These, I suggest, pose the risk of undermining the opportunity students have to develop and practice civic virtues. I raise the possibility that schools teach different kinds of civic virtue to different kinds of children.

School choice and educational opportunity: Rationales, outcomes and racial disparities

This article examines the rationales for school choice, and the significance of choice mechanisms for racial disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes. It identifies tensions between liberty-based rationales and equality-based rationales, and surveys research findings on the outcomes of school choice policies, especially with regard to the racial composition of schools and distribution of opportunities. It concludes that school choice policies are multifarious and lack cohesion, that many existing mechanisms of choice lack proper public justification, and that the outcomes of these policies and mechanisms are at odds with most of the goals identified by their advocates, particularly for minority families.

Wartime citizenship: An argument for shared fate

This paper examines the connections among compatriots, their conceptualization and the effects that war has on the moral realities of nationality. Recent conceptions of citizenship, and particularly the view that citizenship is an aspect of personal identity, are considered in light of the demands that wartime creates within a nation. I focus on the notion of citizenship as shared fate as a productive lens to use in the analysis of national affiliation, and to employ in the process of education for citizenship.

Parental engagement through school choice: Some reasons for caution

Implementing school choice programs and bolstering parental engagement are both frequently touted as critical steps in improving educational outcomes in US schools. Many policy makers contend that by providing parents with more schooling options for their children, parents will become more involved in their children’s education, resulting in better and more equitable opportunities. The authors consider whether more school choices necessarily translate into more robust parental involvement, by chronicling for 5 years both the opportunities for and barriers to engagement that parents encountered in the Clarksville School District as it underwent a significant period of reform. The authors conclude that school choice does not always have a positive impact on parental engagement, and engagement in turn does not always translate into better or more equitable opportunities. In some cases, increased choice may present additional challenges to parents as they struggle to find accurate information, weigh a variety of problematic options, and consider the impact of their personal decisions on their children and on the overall well-being of the district.

Don’t @ me: rethinking digital civility online and in school

ABSTRACT Online platforms enable free-form, spontaneous, unbridled political expression, blurring the public and private, the written and spoken, and the norms of formal and casual speech. Consequently, they pose new opportunities and challenges to civic interactions, necessitating a reconfiguration of the norms informing civic exchanges. In this paper, we introduce a relational account of civility attuned to emerging modes of civic interactions online, one which goes beyond prescribing specific modes of speech and conduct. We suggest three characteristics of civility in digital contexts: commitment to ongoing and just dialogue, seeking a diverse audience with a shared goal, and horizontal accountability. We then make the case for schools’ vital role in cultivating digital civility. Rather than introducing new curricular content, we argue for reframing existing school engagement with online communication to support the development of digital civility, in light of the shifting forms of participation that typify youth civic engagement today.

Introduction: Big data and education: ethical and moral challenges:

Big data is a buzzword in education policy today, and some of the most popular modes of education reforms, such as personalized learning, revisions of disciplinary practices, placements, and assignments, rely on probabilistic conclusions drawn from large data sets. In other words, many schools now make decisions about what students learn, how they are taught, and how they are treated based on troves of data collected about students through the use of educational technological platforms and applications. What is big data, and how does it inform educational practice? And most importantly, what are the normative and ethical issues that arise from these uses? The main goal of this volume is to frame the educational discussion on the use of big data in normative terms, and to offer some preliminary guidance for scholars, educators, and policymakers on the key considerations that should guide the design and implementation of tools based on big data. As in the quote from Borges presented above, big data scientists have a capacity today to create ‘a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire’ – they can collect, store, and manage a stream of data about each student that would not only document snapshots of, say, their reading levels at the beginning and the end of each year, but would also include their rate of timely homework submission, each time they are tardy or absent, their day-to-day grade change, their minute behavior infractions – no action is too small to be captured and stored, no two actions too different to correlate with 737201 TRE0010.1177/1477878517737201Theory and Research in EducationBen-Porath and Harel Ben Shahar research-article2017

Exit Rights and Entrance Paths: Accommodating Cultural Diversity in a Liberal Democracy

The debate over the accommodation of culture in liberal democracies tends to emphasize exit rights. Autonomy is typically taken as a pre-condition for exit, and public schools are often charged with promoting or facilitating it. I argue that diversity liberals have a more justifiable view than that of autonomy liberals on cultural accommodation, but diversity liberalism too should reframe its view of exit rights. Narrow exit rights that protect basic human rights should be maintained and augmented with entrance paths into general society. I further suggest that for exit rights along with entrance paths to provide the morally required conditions for accommodating culture while respecting freedom, policies in this realm should be designed to address adults rather than children. I consider the effect of this dual change of perspective on the accommodation of culture in democratic institutions, including schools.