Who should be writing about education and isn’t?
Mike Rose is a highly respected education scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles who has researched and written about literacy, cognition, language and the struggles of America’s working class. He has taught over several decades — from kindergarten and elementary writing to adult literacy — and has made some important contributions to the education field.
He has written nearly a dozen books, including “The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker,” which demonstrated the heavy cognitive demands of blue-collar and service work and what it takes to do such work well, despite the tendency of many to underestimate and undervalue the intelligence involved in such work. The best-selling “Lives on the Boundary” tells the story of the struggles and achievements of unprepared students and how their lack of literacy skills is a result of poor education — not a shortage of intelligence.
Other books he has written include “Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education,” “Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America” and “Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us.”
In the following post, Rose looks at how elite media outlets address education — and who winds up writing the stories. Because Rose writes specifically about the New Yorker magazine, I have included a comment from its editor, David Remnick, at the end.
This appeared on Rose’s blog (and which he gave me permission to publish):
By Mike Rose
There’s a rock in my shoe, a small thing, a really small thing that I started noticing years ago and can’t shake loose, an irritant that has grown in significance.
Over the last 20 years, the New Yorker magazine has published 60 articles under the banner “Annals of Medicine,” and 38 of them — 63 percent — are written by medical doctors. During that same period, the magazine has published 17 articles under the banner “Annals of Education,” and not a single one of them is written by a professional educator, nary a classroom teacher or educational researcher among the authors. To pick two examples of omission, life-long teachers and writers Deborah Meier and Vivian Paley, both recipients CONTINUE READING: Who should be writing about education and isn’t? - The Washington Post