Social Issues in Education

5. Kozol notes in these chapters how disadvantaged students in low socio-economic areas are on high stakes tests, which hasn’t been helped by the past educational policies. Students in these areas are not given the proper resources to be able to succeed and they are told that sheer willpower will get them to succeed on their tests. This reinforces the fact that more and more these days teachers are only teaching to the test instead of teaching for their students to excel in life. However, amidst all these obstacles there still manages to be inspirational and successful teachers, as Kozol recognizes in chapter 12. There are many teachers who rise above the demands of the high stakes testing system and enable their students to achieve success in their schooling and professional lives.

4. "I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations," the president said again in his re-election in September 2004. "It's working. It's making a difference." It is one of those deadly lies which by sheer repetition, is at length accepted by large numbers of Americans…”
“Teachers and principals should not permit the beautiful profession they have chosen to be redefined by those who know far less than they about the hearts of children.”
“The longer this goes on, the further these two roads divide, the more severe and routinized these race-specific pedagogies may become, the harder it will be to find a place of common ground on which the children of the many ethnic groups and social classes in our nation’s public schools will ever actually meet.”
“In these settings, teachers do not tend to let concerns about our nation’s competition in the global marketplace intrude upon the more important needs of childhood, such as the right to find some happiness in being children.”
3. "standard-based reform"- Measure a student’s achievement against a concrete standard instead of comparing them against other students.
Small school initiative- The need to make schools much smaller than they are now to fight the overpopulation problem in American high schools.
No Child Left Behind- The Act requires states to develop assessments in basic skills to be given to all students in certain grades, if those states are to receive federal funding for schools.
2. So many of the reforms and reformers that Kozol mentioned have been instrumental in all of my education classes. I have learned about W.E.B. Dubois and his belief that all children, no matter their color, can learn at the same level. I think this is the prime argument of Kozol. No matter the students’ socio-economic status, race, or any other factor, they are all able to achieve at the same level, so there should be no need for educational standards to differ throughout a city.
I don’t remember the speaker’s name, but there was a speaker that came to Baylor last year who spoke on the dangers of high stakes testing. He said that while there should be standards and tests to measure them, so much importance on a student’s career should not be placed on these tests. I think this could be a solution to Kozol’s problems.

1. What makes the schools mentioned in chapter 12 so different than other schools and how can we make more schools like this?

Last meeting, some thoughts were procured in my head about the situation in American Schools. What seems to keep coming up, especially in the video that was shown at the beginning of class, is that the achievement gap of minorities is directly related to all the other gaps they face in their life. But I can’t seem to figure out which one is the cause. Maybe they are both effects of each other, but thinking that way makes it very difficult to fix either problem. Thus far, we have been focusing on the achievement gap as the cause of the other problems and have been trying to close that gap to fix the others. Some may argue that using that approach hasn’t worked and we need a new approach. But maybe it’s not the cause we got wrong, maybe it’s the way we try to close the achievement gap. We know that all students aren’t treated the same. It’s like Dr. T said, what worth do we attribute to our students? Some schools do have predetermined worths attributed to all their students, whether they truly earned it or not. I catch myself thinking all the time how I believe every student CAN do the work; they just need some guidance and help getting there and believing in themselves. However, in many of my experiences in the school system, I find that teachers get in the rut of doing the “same thing we’ve always done” instead of reevaluating the things that don’t work- like endless worksheets. I feel like teachers have given up in a sense and figure if the child isn’t getting it it’s the child’s fault, not theirs. Now, this isn’t the case everywhere, but even if this happened in 1% of the schools in the United States it would be happening too much. The job of a teacher is to inspire their students to greatness, and that isn’t going to happen with a worksheet on the causes of World War I. We need to make everything relevant to the students. This is especially important with students who don’t have parents who hound them on the importance of schooling because their parents never finished themselves. How did all the teachers in those inspirational teacher true story movies ever reach their kids? Well, in Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, they first took a step into their students’ world and pulled some rap music out of it to make them realized that English is everywhere. In Mr. Holland’s Opus, he showed the students the influences of classical music on his students’ favorite Rock songs. In Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams showed his students that poetry is an individual expression that must be felt inside and out, and there are no right and wrong answers in poetry. What did all these teachers have in common? They all reached out into their students’ worlds and made school relevant to their life. I think that is the key to closing the achievement gap. Tests and teaching to the test isn’t going to help students achieve more in school, but making school important to them will.

NOTE: I read Kozol's "The Shame of the Nation" on the Amazon Kindle for the iPhone, so my refrences are not in page numbers but "Locations."

Emily Wilson
1/24/10
Kozol “The Shame of the Nation” Countdown Paper
5- Kozol believes that the entire education system has become re-segregated. He thinks that this re-segregation is detrimental to the intellectual and academic welfare of the students in these areas of the United States in which this is occurring. Not only are the urban areas becoming predominately populated with the minority populations, but the suburban areas are becoming less diversely populated, and the school boards are allowing this to happen, passing it as “diverse.” Schools are focused on becoming “diverse” by admitting more minority students, but they fail to realize that the purpose of desegregation was to equalize the populations in schools. What Kozol found happens in these urban, black schools is that the teachers are sub-par and the curriculum doesn’t push the students to achieve or strive to become more than the community tells them to. Further, the efforts made by the school boards to measure the effectiveness of their education system are by far the worst measure of these students in the urban areas who struggle with high stakes testing.
4- A. “There was a high level of political sophistication among those in leadership positions in the black community; and, in the course of framing goals and analyzing structures, they recognized the multitude of different forces that diminished opportunity for children in the neighborhood…The goal was to unlock the chains that held these children within caste-and-color sequestration and divorced them from the mainstream of American society.” (Intro, Location 98-112)
B. “I don’t think you can discern these consequences solely by examination of statistics or the words of education analysts or highly placed officials in school systems…They are, in this respect, pure witnesses, and we will hear their testimony in these pages.” (Intro, Location 185-196)
C. “One of the consequences of their isolation, as the pastor observed, is that they have little knowledge of the ordinary reference points that are familiar to most children in the world that Pineapple described as “over there”… (Chapter 1 Location 245-254)
D. “Perhaps most damaging to any effort to address this subject openly is the refusal of most of the major arbiters of culture in our northern cities to confront or even clearly name an obvious reality they would have castigated with a passionate determination in another section of the nation 50 years before and which, moreover, they still castigate today in retrospective writings that assign it to an comfortably distant and allegedly concluded era of the past…” (Chapter 1 Location 305-312).
3- a. Segregation- Kozol makes sure we understand that segregation isn’t just about where black students are allowed to go, but what school they end up financially able to attend. Even though black students are allowed to attend any school they want, the financial barriers end up being too great, and we end up with 99% minority student population. So, our schools today are in fact unconsciously segregated.
b. Apartheid- any system or practice that separates people according to race, caste, etc.
c. Poverty- the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor; indigence.
2- a. These situations that Kozol describes in his books are very prevalent in my own experiences in education, both as a student and as a pre-service teacher. As a student, it was HISD that was known as the run-down and minority-driven district, while Katy ISD was known as the ritzy district with mostly white kids and new schools getting built every couple of years. As a pre-service teacher, I have seen that districts definitely segregate themselves by race and that segregation is determined by financial situation of their families. In WISD, the students are often working to help keep their family above water, while kids in MISD are working to gain some spending money for themselves.
b. A lot of Kozol’s arguments I heard at least a little of in my TED 4341 class. A lot of these issues are very prevalent in the Social Studies, not just as studying material, but to make sure you understand when you try to teach your students. You need to understand their cultural base before you try and teach them Social Studies.
1. How can this problem be fixed? Or can it?

So, this is my blog for my Social Issues in Education class at Baylor University. I will be reading various authors who speak of social issues in education such as poverty, race, and sexuality. So periodically I will be posting my opinions and thoughts on those issues here. Feel free to see what I'm up to- and comment!