Social Issues in Education

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?