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Using Lani Guinier’s relay-race story, the lecture distinguishes questions about winners and losers, rule-makers and power, and the stories told to losers to keep them engaged. 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The story comes from Lani Guinier, Professor of Law at Harvard University, who wrote a book with Gerald Torres a few years ago called The Miner’s Canary (Guinier & Torres, 2003) . In this book, she tells the story of being at a family party where young children were outside in the yard engaging in a relay race. It’s the race where you have to carry a golf ball in a spoon, run to the next person, and pass the ballon, and you see which team can get the ball to the finish line first. It was girls against boys. The girls won. So the boys demanded a rematch. And the girls won again.  \nAs Guinier and the other adults were watching from the sidelines, they tried to analyze the race, asking questions like, Why are the girls winning? What is it about the girls? Are they more coordinated? Are they more patient? And why aren't the boys winning? What's up with the boys? Until at one point, the grandmother of one of the children paused the conversation by asking, Who chose this game? Guinier argues that that question reminds her that, when we are trying to make sense of a conflict or a competition, we tend to ask only certain kinds of questions, and yet there are other kinds of questions that are perhaps the more important questions that we need to be asking but that rarely get asked.  \nShe tells us that there are three kinds of questions that we need to be asking. The first is the question that we tend to ask most often: Who is winning and who is losing? This is the question that many of the adults were asking with the relay race. The implication is that if we figure out why the winners are winning, maybe we can help the losers to compete better, or we can help them to win. In other words, maybe we can fix the losers. The second kind of question is reflected by what the grandmother asked: Who made the rules to this game? It is often the people in positions of power who make the rules to the game, and they make those rules in ways that advantage them in the competition. This isnot to say that girls are naturally more coordinated or patient or skillful. But it is not surprising that they would choose a game that they were more likely to win and that, infact, they did win twice. There is a third type of question that we almost never ask that is perhaps the most significant of them all: What is the story that we tell the losers to get them to want to continue playing? In the relay race, the boys knew that the girls chose the  \n1 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Kevin Kumashiro, University Hall, Room 819, 601 S. Morgan (MC 231), Chicago, [IL 60607. Email: kevink@uic.edu](IL 60607. Email: kevink@uic.edu).  \nBerkeley Review of Education Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 5-16  \n6 Kumashiro  \ngames, and they knew that they were losing, but they insisted on continuing to play because they were buying into the story that there was something fair about the game, and that they had a chance to win.  \nAsking the Right Questions about Problems in Education  \nThese three questions can apply to other contexts as well, including education, ","cbCaihDXgRJjc1sG","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaihDXgRJjc1sG","pdf",258437,13,"English","# Reflections on “Bad Teachers”\n## Asking the Right Questions about Problems in Education","[{\"question\":\"What does Kumashiro argue about the way people interpret “bad teachers”?\",\"answer\":\"He argues that focusing on simplistic judgments about who is winning and who is losing distorts the larger picture. A better analysis requires asking different kinds of questions that consider rules, power, and narratives.\"},{\"question\":\"What are the three key types of questions highlighted through the relay-race story?\",\"answer\":\"They are: who is winning and who is losing, who made the rules to the game, and what story is told to the losers to keep them playing.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the discussion connect these questions to standardized and high-stakes testing?\",\"answer\":\"The first lens maps to the achievement gap and attempts to “close the gap.” The second lens points to who sets the rules and how tests reflect cultural bias and curriculum misalignment, while the third lens centers on how norm-referenced testing is structured.\"}]","Reflections on “Bad Teachers” - Reflections on education problems and question framing | PDF",1792079821,33]