Johanek, Michael C

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Education
Educational Leadership
Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education
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Senior Fellow
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1995 - 199922000 - 20044
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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Publication
    Teaching the College Introductory Survey in the High School: Reaching out to AP U.S. History Teachers
    (2003-11-01) Johanek, Michael C; Venkateswaran, Uma; Charap, Lawrence
    The College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) program now serves as a strong vehicle for promoting high academic standards, with college-level work for high school students. The product of a unique collaboration between high school teachers and college faculty dating back to the 1950s, AP is the de facto standard for academic programs that help students make the transition from high school to college. The recognition of AP as a program of academic excellence has, in turn, fueled a rapid expansion in the number of students taking the examinations. Last year, approximately 250,000 students took the Advanced Placement United States History examination. With this growth comes the continued twin challenges of maintaining high standards that correspond with advances in each discipline, and expanding access to these rigorous courses in much more equitable ways. In this article we provide a brief overview of college faculty's involvement in the school-college collaboration that is AP, including the College Board's expanded efforts to strengthen its support to AP teachers.
  • Publication
    Race, Gender and Ethnicity in the United States History Survey: Introduction
    (2004-08-01) Johanek, Michael C
    It is one of the great pleasures and challenges of the Advanced Placement Program that many of the central enduring dilemmas of a discipline insist upon resolution. The sort of matters that can provoke the wry smiles of seasoned colleagues across a faculty meeting require concrete resolution for the real-world operation of this large-scale liberal arts enterprise seeking to span the realms of school and college. These matters can not be for us, in that lamentable popular expression, "an academic question." Courses need to be taught, teachers supported, students challenged, work assessed. And what are these dilemmas? Our authors have set some of these on the table for us: What constitutes the survey, and what are its central goals? How do we "reconcile the tyranny of generalization with the anarchy of the particular" as Jonathan Chu so nicely puts it? How do we ensure that new research in women's history - or any other new threads of scholarship for that matter - gets integrated into college and AP high school courses, and avoids the "add women and stir" recipe approach Mary Frederickson so aptly captured? (I do note it is a cooking metaphor, but will leave it there). How do we get beyond the "basic mantra of patriarchal hegemony," as Mary argues, and destabilize the survey a bit, even perhaps transforming it by letting go of chronology some, by subverting the "tyranny of coverage," and by stopping cleaning up the dirty mess that is our wonderful human heritage, arriving someday, just maybe, beyond the "unsexed and neutered" stories, learning more richly about women and men? How do we move ethnicity and immigration beyond, as Diane Vecchio urges, their bounded period units and beyond their association with "problems"? And in all of this, how can we insure, as Uma Venkateswaran has illustrated, that the way we assess student achievement fairly reflects what we're after, and also helps us understand what in fact is happening in classrooms around the country, so that we can inform ourselves more accurately of the status of this noble craft? For the survey, and therefore for the AP United States history course, these questions get answered whether explicitly addressed or not. AP is a mirror, if you will, as faithful as our approaches allow, to the answers made by faculty on their own.
  • Publication
    Review of Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research
    (2003-09-01) Johanek, Michael C
    Brutish and bloody ethnic slaughter across the globe. Dangerous environmental degradation. Stifling cultural ennui with rampant turbo-consumerism. Menacing saber rattling from Gaza to the Taiwan Strait. Narrow problematics in education research.
  • Publication
    The Public Purposes of Public Education: The Evolution of Community-Centered Schooling at Benjamin Franklin High School, 1934-1944
    (1995-09-11) Johanek, Michael C
    In 1934, Italian immigrant Leonard Covello and others set up Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. Its purpose was to coordinate the educational influences emanating the neighborhood's many institutions, and to inform local citizen decision-making with intensive local social research. A leader in urban education, Benjamin Franklin High pioneered a distinctive community-centered schooling. Covello insisted that "education for social living" be based on solving real community problems in order to prepare students for leadership and civic participation. Problems ranging from poor housing to leisure opportunities to intergroup relations were channeled through Franklin's system of school-community committees. This dissertation describes the evolution of the vision, one of active public purpose, that inspired Benjamin Franklin High in its early years. How did the ideas that guided such an unusual school mission evolve? How were they shaped and changed by their interaction with local events, national trends, demographics, personalities, and social conditions? Though an institutional history, this essay attempts to capture the interplay among a wide configuration of educating agents, in particular the "messy" dynamics of a public school's relationship to its community. Fundamental tensions regarding the nature of the public purposes of schooling, as well as whose purposes are pursued, underlie this intensely local struggle. Chapter I describes the social, economic, and political context of East Harlem in the early 1930s, including the campaign to establish Benjamin Franklin. Chapter II sets out the broader conversation about community schooling in the early 1930s. Chapter III presents the life of Leonard Covello, examining the complex interplay of religious, intellectual, and personal experiences that influenced his vision of public. schooling for East Harlem. In Chapters IV and V, the challenges of promoting cultural democracy - through local research, storefront units, adult education, teacher training, curriculum and public rallies - flesh out the idea of community-centered schooling as it evolved in East Harlem. Drawing upon varied traditions of community research, early urban sociology, social Christianity and settlement house traditions, Covello shaped a distinct vision of schooling's public role in the democratic development of a diverse people. Implications for current education policy are suggested.
  • Publication
    Accounting for Citizenship: Are our expectations for civic education too modest?
    (2004-07-14) Johanek, Michael C; Puckett, John
    In an era of tests and standards, how do our schools score in preparing citizens? Are any superintendents worrying about their jobs because of low civic scores on state assessments? There is no more central purpose to schools in a democracy than the preparation of citizens, yet you would hardly know it from how we hold these key public institutions accountable. Questions about the health of our civic life underlie many of today's central campaign issues, from taxes to foreign policy. What sort of democracy are we, and what do we expect every citizen to be able to do?
  • Publication
    The Evolution of College Entrance Examinations
    (1996) Stewart, Donald M; Johanek, Michael C
    Over the last 150 years, one of the hallmarks of American education has been the testing of increasingly large groups of people through processes of growing sophistication made possible by continuing advances in the technology of information processing. Much of this testing has been largely external to the instructional process, driven by the interests of policymakers and governments, especially vis-à-vis grades K-12, and has served various ends.