Unasked or unheard?: turning up the volume on Sprague’s questions

ABSTRACT

The six questions that Sprague posed in 1992 serve as a guide for mapping current educational policies and philosophies. The national educational policies of the past four administrations have seen little uptake of the critical answers to Sprague’s six questions offered by scholars of teaching and learning over the same period of time. The thirty-year historical trend away from critical pedagogy precedes the current administration’s indifference to education, and the controversy surrounding Betsy DeVos distracts from the broad political support for teacher accountability, transmission or “banking” models of education, and compliance-based programs. These same trends have shaped postsecondary education, which emphasizes job readiness over civic commitments, promotes a meritocracy, has de-professionalized faculty, and equates benchmarks with learning. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and the critical pedagogies embraced by many teachers are two notable exceptions to these historical trends. The next phase of critical communication education should focus on sharing this work with public audiences and documenting the true cost of impactful, equitable, transformative education.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational advocacy
• critical pedagogy
• educational policy
• historical trends
• national boards

Notes on contributors

Kathleen F. McConnell earned a PhD in rhetoric and public culture from Indiana University in 2008. She teaches and researches educational rhetorics and is finishing an ethnographic and archival study of two alternative public universities. She regularly writes about the state of academic labor in higher education and is Editor-in-Chief of the Review of Communication.

Melissa Urbain earned her E.D.D. from San José State University in 2018. She is a Representative for the California Teachers Association State Council and a 2006 alumna of City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley. In 2019 she received the City Year Comcast NBC Universal Leadership Award for outstanding dedication to improving public education and commitment to building a more just, equal, fair, and compassionate world.

Notes

1 The charter school movement, for example, has seen support in the last decade from a number of prominent Democratic leaders including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, California Governor Jerry Brown, and former New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker.

2 Mandatory expulsion or removal policies, which reflect a top-down model of power, are another common feature that span administrations (Curran, 2019).

3 The DeVos family is the 351st richest in America according to the 2018 Forbes 400 list.

4 DeVos's budget proposals are more radical than her policy gains. In 2018, Department of Education proposed $9.2 billion in cuts to federal education funding and reserved $1 billion for charter and religious schools specifically (Fiscal Year, 2018).

5 The one exception might be the 2017 decision by the White House to overrule the Department of Education and rescind Obama-era protections for transgender students (Peters, Becker, & Hirschfeld Davis, 2017).

6 The first National Conference on Assessment in Higher Education was held in 1985. The National Institute of Education and the American Association for Higher Education cosponsored it, and Education Secretary William J. Bennett wrote the foreword to the conference proceedings (Adelman, 1986).