UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Mythologies of School Reform in Online News Discourses A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Education by Nicholas Georgopoulos 2018 © Copyright by Nicholas Georgopoulos 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Mythologies of School Reform in Online News Discourses by Nicholas Georgopoulos Doctor of Philosophy in Education University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Associate Professor Thomas M. Philip, Chair This dissertation examines mainstream online discourses about school reform in the English-speaking world. Based on mythological theories of Barthes, Lévi- Strauss, and V. Propp as well as W. L. Bennett’s theory of news, I develop a method for reading mythic structures in news articles: how authors construct crises and lost objects. My findings reveal discourses centered around 1. the mythic figure of the ineffective teacher and its eradication, and 2. the school that can satisfy a student’s educational needs (including their need to enter the 21st century job market) and “learning style.” In these discourses, the lost objects generate infinite activity for actors through their perpetual failure to achieve these objects. I show how a deliberately crafted myth can offer an alternative to the “bad infinite” dy- namics of school choice and Standards and Accountability. My example for this is Sugata Mitra’s project, School in the Cloud, a low-cost network of Internet sta- tions in which children around the world teach themselves through the online en- ii couragement of educated volunteers. While Mitra and his commentators partake liberally of prevailing discourses of “digital education,” the School in the Cloud cannot be reduced to just another form of it. The underexplored human facilita- tor (“granny”) reveals novel pedagogical possibilities and challenges, both in the Third World and universally. In dealing with myths of school choice, ineffective teachers, and the School in the Cloud, my goal is not to debunk the myths or engage with them on the level of their “factuality.” Debunking discourses will merely strengthen the frame of the myth. The point is to make the frame visible, so that we, a collective subject, may select a new frame. I end by outlining how an “endemic” myth can provide a pedagogic project for a new American education. iii The dissertation of Nicholas Georgopoulos is approved. Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt Douglas Kellner Kenneth Reinhard Thomas M. Philip, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Thomas Philip, for his guidance in converting my individual view of the world into scholarly research. His perspectives provided the indispensable window to the outside. I would like to thank the members of my thesis committee for their help in grinding away the rough, rocky material that once obscured the core of this work. I’m deeply inspired by their commitment to their fields. I will continue polishing this work with the help of their generous, personal, and uncompromising recom- mendations from the past several years. The ideas I encountered and developed in my coursework with Dr. Charles Goodwin and Dr. Noel Enyedy are of inestimable value. I would like to thank Nancy Parachini and other folks at UCLA Center X. Every “elevator speech” I gave about this dissertation was another chance to evaluate its sense and significance. I would like to thank my family for their financial support and encouragement to see the process through to the end. This work wouldn’t have been possible without the encouragement, advice, and genuine humanity of Juliet Lee. This work is dedicated to Zita, who has been with me every step of this grueling and rewarding journey. v Contents Acknowledgements . .v List of Figures . viii List of Tables . ix Biographical Sketch . .x 1 Introduction 1 2 Theoretical Frameworks and Analytic Method 9 2.1 Mythic narratives . .9 2.2 Roland Barthes and the semiology of myth . 16 2.3 Depoliticization . 21 2.4 Reading Bennett with Barthes . 24 2.5 Building a method from the frameworks . 30 3 Mythology of School Choice 37 3.1 The myth of needs . 38 3.2 The needs of students and society . 47 3.3 The infinite curriculum . 52 3.4 The calculus of finding the right public school . 56 3.5 Choice as privilege and empowerment . 61 4 The Ineffective Teacher 66 4.1 Constitution of the myth . 67 4.2 Kids not widgets . 76 4.3 The Seventy Four .............................. 78 4.4 Vergara v. California ............................ 85 4.5 The Vergara appeals ruling . 88 4.6 The passionate educator . 92 4.7 The brilliant eccentric . 94 4.8 Myths, hegemony, and suture . 100 4.9 Conclusion . 103 5 Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud 105 5.1 Introduction . 105 5.2 Historical background . 107 5.3 Trajectory of discursive frames . 111 5.4 Discussion . 120 vi 5.5 The futures of Sole graduates . 132 6 Summary of Findings and Connections to Theory and Practice 135 6.1 Second-order significations of school reform . 135 6.2 Significance to the field of education research . 144 Bibliography 160 vii List of Figures 2.1 Initial spreadsheet . 32 2.2 Concordances around “ineffective teacher” . 33 2.3 Thread of “ineffective teacher” . 34 viii List of Tables 2.1 Myth as second-order sign system . 17 2.2 Barthes’ myth of the French soldier . 19 4.1 The Seventy Four’s modus operandi .................... 80 4.2 Mr. Katz and the Golden Apple as mythic signifiers of equity and quality . 84 4.3 The mythic reduction of quality to quantity, the economization of intelligence . 87 4.4 “A new framework for the teaching profession” . 87 4.5 Students’ needs as a mythic signifier of Accountability . 101 6.1 Learning styles as a signifier of choice . 136 6.2 Educational needs as a signifier of employers’ needs . 137 6.3 The myth of effective teaching . 137 6.4 Privilege as a mythic signifier of choice . 138 6.5 Brown as a mythic signifier of Vergara .................. 139 6.6 Plato et al. as mythic signifiers of creativity, etc. 140 6.7 Creativity and wonder as mythic signifiers of self-organization . 140 ix Biographical Sketch I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Music Theory with a minor in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After a brief certification program at National-Louis University, I earned my Illinois certificate in high school mathe- matics, science, and music and a Master of Arts in Teaching in mathematics. Between 2007 and 2012, I worked as a high school math and science teacher on the West Side of Chicago at an alternative charter school for re-enrolled dropouts. While working there, I earned a master’s degree in Linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University. Besides a solid foundation in topics like phonology and gen- erative syntax, that program introduced me to sociolinguistic concepts like iden- tity construction, stance, positioning. There, I also gained a foothold in qualita- tive analysis methods. I presented at conferences in Chicago, Illinois; Boulder, Colorado; Aruba; and Athens, Greece. My master’s thesis paper was on the spa- tial semiotics (Scollon’s term, “geosemiotics”) of Syntagma Square during Athens’ 2011 Occupy movement. Between 2012 and the present, I have delved deeper into studies in Cultural- Historical Activity Theory, Saussurian linguistics, Continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The educators who have guided my thinking the most have been Plato, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, Jacques Lacan, and Paulo Freire. By putting these and other thinkers against each other, I hope to some- day answer the question, “What is education in and for itself?” x In 2017, I moved to South Carolina and spent the 2017–2018 school year teach- ing middle school mathematics. xi Chapter 1 Introduction “Myths are not merely a passive representation of cultural life; rather, they are reflexive, in the sense that the cultural participants view their own culture through the spectacles of myth. They are therefore not just ideological representations of rules which inform a culture, they take part in the in-formation of culture; they are not always guided formations, but, in many cases, steering mechanisms as well” (Liszka, 1989, p. 15). When I started exploring discourses about teachers, I was immediately struck by the many heroic narratives that they presented. These discourses dealt with exceptional, even sensational, accounts of teachers intervening in needy students’ lives. I failed to see myself or former coworkers in these narratives. They felt unreal, larger than life, mythic. This perception compelled me to broaden my the- oretical understanding of myth especially as it relates to sociological frameworks. The next step was to read articles from widespread sources and personal blogs in order to spot patterns or contexts in which to apply the theories. There are real contradictions in education, and the competing discourses about the nature of this crisis make up a fragmented picture. The teacher at the center of this contradiction is a chimerical figure. On the one hand, its basic incompetence threatens the constitutional right of every child to an appropriate education. On the other hand, a teacher can be a student’s lifeline, help them “live, love, and 1 breathe in the world” (Lolita, 2016), and set them on the path to college when they would otherwise end up in poverty, crime, and suicide (“Great Teachers Save Lives [Literally],” Edelman, 2015). One story describes a “passionate educator” (Jung, 2014), someone who goes above and beyond the call of duty, while in another the “brilliant eccentric” (Secret Teacher, 2015) is an endangered species that cannot be measured by any test. As these signifiers billow ever skyward, they perpetually fail to point to an object of political or professional praxis.