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?