In his Edutopia blog post, the Reading Rainbow host talks about the importance of reading and how we can try to instill s love for reading in students. I love that he says “We have to show up where kids are hanging out, and bring them back to the written word.” I also appreicate that, right at the begining, he acknowledges visual mediums as a useful form of education, as not to say that they are less important than reading, but that reading should also be just as important.
I can’t wait until my copy of Paul Tough’s recently published book, Helping Children Succeed comes in the mail. I wrote a brief review on his last book, How Children Succeed, which I loved for it’s ability to connect learning behavior and attitudes, both positive and negative, to nereoulogical processes. For now, I’ll just read his recent NYT article that features an adaption of one of the sections from Helping Children Succeed.
I can’t agree with Ebony Bridewell-Mitchell TEDxHGSE‘s viewpoint any further.
Schools are a far more complex social system than we tend to treat them, so the solution to fixing public schools is just as complex.
She argues that one of the items we must understand about schools is that they are systems that are both “enabled by their environment and constrained by their environment.”
Joel Klein, former NYC public schools chancellor and Cami Anderson, former superintendent of Newark public schools (and former Klein advisor) are great examples of administrators struggling to push for change in the mixy-mess that is education.
While I disagree with some of Joel Klein’s initiatives, I believe he was effective in many of his controversial programs because he understood, to a certain degree, the inner workings of the overly bureaucratic NYC public school system. He understood some of the deep-seated behaviors and mentalities of some educational beauracrats who used their power to their benefit at the expense of providing students with a quality education. He also did a good job at vocalizing what was happening within schools, as a way to support some of the changes he wanted to implement. He pushed for school choice because local, district schools were failing. But despite this fact, communities wanted to hang out to these underperforming schools, which have their own complex history. Klein worked with the UFT to open smaller public and charter schools that would gift teachers and students with an easier load. This was an excellent move that showed his ability to mix the old with the new and deal with such a controversial issue in a more humanistic way. His time at the DOJ’s Antitrust Division served him well.
Cami Anderson, former superintendent of Newark, NJ public schools, could have been more careful about making changes to similar issues. While she meant well, there were times where she chose not to involve parents with major policy changes and that affected how parents perceived and interacted with her. I think she is the perfect example of a education leader who struggled with working with the system and thought it easier to entirely dismiss the foundation that was laid before her arrival.
I was talking to a friend last night about property tax and the role it plays in widening the education gap between poor, middle class and wealthy communities. I started toying around with the idea of reallocating funds from relatively well funded schools/districts to nearby poor performing, low funded districts. My friend took the stance that funds,whether provided by the State or the district, should not be taken out of a particular district. I agreed that local funds, steming directly from a communities property taxes, should stay in the community but distribution of State taxes should be determined based on need. In other words, I’m not in favor for providing all districts with at least a minimum amount of funding, regardless of need.
My friend said the solution shouldn’t be to take away from any school and that it should be some other way to help students out of poverty. I tried to reason what this but couldn’t see how badly well funded schools can be affected. I gave her the following hypothetical:
With the use of both state and local funding from property taxes, a school on Long Island offers its students eight AP classes. There’s another school, twenty minutes away and in New York City, that can’t afford to offer their most talented students any AP classes, making them unable to effectively compete with the nearby Long Island school to get into the colleges that will provide them with the most opporunity to not only succeed in life but help them become independent adults. The State, noting these disparities, decides to take away, say, $2,000 from the Long Island School and give it to the New York City school. This action would, say, bring the Lon Island schools selection of AP clased down to six from right, as well as take away one extracurricular activity out of many. The New York City school would then have two AP classes, rather than zero and a well funded extracurricualr activity that really challeneges the participants. Is this the most effective move? Is this a fair move?
Even with this more detailed example, my friend said that regardless of how many programs a school has, if all students are equal, the State should provide them with equal funding. She believes that the eight-AP-class school should not be penalized, in anyway, so that the New York City school can have a fighting chance. She also said that suburban families should not have to take any amount from their children to proivde for city children, after all, they’re living in the suburbans to get away from the high expenses of city life and to give their kids a better education.
I disagree and , simply put, she essentially thinks I’m crazy.
While I understand what she is saying to a certain extent, how are the children with no little opporunities, ever supposed to get opportunities? I love capitalism but in this respect, as a nation, we must say that we don’t really care that all children are properly educated because to do so would be too socialst and it would require us to take from people who already have and that wouldn’t be right…
We should just tell our kids that someone has to be shit and while there are riches all around you, that’s just not meant for you. Now, don’t get me wrong. I know we can’t save every child and there are parents living in poverty who don’t care about their children’s education. But there are also kids who start off with ambition but end up working at McDonald’s because they were never given a real opporutunites. To those people, we must acknowledge that they’re not the only people who have “failed” themselves. Our society plays a role in that failure. With that said, we shouldn’t complain when our taxes goes towards sysems like welfare and Medicaid. While there are some people who leech on welfare systems, there are plenty of people who are career, welfare depending Wendy’s employees who could have been fully independent individuals had they been given a chance to be more…
But that’s not our problem because, apparently, in order for anyone to be successful they need eight AP classes, rather than six. And those anyones are usually ones who can afford it.
“Whether they were born to poor white Appalachians or to wealthy Texans, to poor black people in the Bronx or to rich people in Manhasset or Winnetka, they are all quite wonderful and innocent when they are small. We soil them needlessly”
– John Kozol, 1991
This is terribly true, but we’re too much of a capitalist country for all students to even have a some what equal opportunity.
Here’s a quote from the education policy classic Savage Inequalities:
We are preparing a generation of robots. Kids are learning exclusively though rote. We have children who are given no conceptual framework. They do not learn to think, becuase their teachers are straightjacketd by tests that measure only isolated skills. As a result, they can be given no electives nothing wonderful or beautiful, nothing that touches the spirit or the soul. [emphasis mine]
This is a quote from a Camden, New Jersey public high school principal. The sad part is that, if you read the quote today, and had no context, you wouldn’t be able to tell it was said in 1990. There are far too many public schools operating the same way today. Jesus. When will it get better?
Success Academy refused to provide a five year old with adequate services to address his learning disabilities. Instead, they sent him home for early dismissal and called his parents nearly every day because he ciolated the Academy’s Code of Coduct. What’s more is that even after he the school formalized a plan that could remedy his disabilities (at least to a certain extent), they refused to actually put those simple remedies, such as deep breathing tactics and taking short walks, in place. They did not want to bend their strict Code of Conduct, which entails sitting upright at all times. Eventually, I.L.’s (he’s called I.L. for privacy) parents were told that I.L. was “not a good fit” for the school. I.L.’s parents removed him from the school.
I.L. was one of the students on the Sucess Academy-Fort Greene’s-should-be-infamous “Got to Go” list, which targeted students with learning and behavioral disabilities for permanant removal. His parents are suing the school, which is fantastic because now we can get a closer look at the gross injustices that students with learning disabilities face at militaristic charter schools. But it’s sad that Success Academy, with all its resources, doesn’t truly take the time to help them. The initial idea behind charter schools was for them to work more closely with kids who have learning and behavioral problems. It’s clear by this list that Success Academy only cares about the students who are “willing to learn.” It also adds to the idea that charters push out the “bad” kids and use the public school system as a “dumpsite. Read more here.
I’m currently reading Alex Kotlowitz’s nationally acclaimed book, There Are No Children Here, a book that displays the harsh affects that poverty has on children who live through it, day in and day out. Kotlowitz starts off by focusing on the violent and burdensome social lives of Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers but then dovetails into very important aspects of the poverty story that has often been said to not be affected by poverty: the school and education of the impoverished child.
Kotlowitz, before describing and connecting the affect that poverty has on Lafayette and Pharoah’s education, gives a general summary of what little resources the principal and teachers have to work with.
“Also, Suder [one of the local schools serving the few thousand kids growing up in the crime infested Horner projects] must share a nurse and psychologist with three other schools and a social worker with four other schools.”
Not only do the children live in poverty, but the schools themselves operate and function in poverty.
But this sentence resonated with me for another reason. My high school severed students from three large project developments. Even though these projects were similar, though less dangerous than Horner, it was obvious that a large number of my fellow classmates were behaviorally troubled because of their environment. What’s more is that my high school in 2010 shared a social worker with three other high schools, like Horner in 1987. Nearly a quarter of a century later and we still can’t admit that not acknowledging poverty as a real detriment to students academic and social success has much to do with why children who live through it can’t break the cycle.
I admire this book, because like How Children Succeed, it acknowledges that education needs more than “better” teachers. The problem is far more complicated than that.
Short, precise and well thought out documentaries can be more useful and efficient alternatives to time sucking films, according to the NYT‘s “Film Club”, which produces 8-12 minute long mini-documentaries that are aimed at adding onto how students take in and reflect on various subjects. I love the article’s emphasis on critical thinking skills. Each mini-documentary comes with supplement materials that help facilitate a conversation about topics such as the documentary’s purpose and individual student’s personal reflection and reaction to a documentary. But, what I think is more important is the encouragement for students to write down quotes or note parts that stood out to them. I think this is a great opportunity to allow students to pay attention and find what appeals to them (or what doesn’t) and then try to articulate (either orally or writing) why they feel the way they do. Rather than watching an hour long film, students can spend the class period watching a ten minue mini-documentary, five minutes on individual reflection, then break out into mini groups discussing their thoughts and answering questions tailored to provoking critical thinking skills. The teacher would pop-in on each group’s session, taking note of each students oral articulation skills and provide feedback to the student on a one-on-one basis at some point before week’s end.
This week, I started a new tutoring program that helps sophomore high school students prepare for the PSAT. As noted a number of times in the past, I majored in English, and so I help two students improve their verbal PSAT score(they took a pre-PSAT). These students were recommended by their guidance counselors and deemed as those on the college track. Generally speaking, these students are minorities in public schools that are subpar. Generally speaking, they’re relatively shy but encouragingly focused and career oriented. They’re motivated and have an understanding that they can have a beautiful life years from now, if they work hard now.
The issue I found, despite all these glorious traits, is that they didn’t know how to use commas or semicolons. They couldn’t write four concise consecutive sentences. And when asked how they could make their weakly connected sentences better, they had no clue how to.
Time is an issue here. The time I have with them is supposed to be used to teach them how to take the PSAT in twelve hours across twelve weeks. But, I cant jump into how to take the test when they’re not well versed on the basics. I don’t know how to ignore that deficiency, and they deserve more than that. I’ll just spend a few hours on the basics and then end that chapter of the class with a quiz, one on one assesment and then continous feedback on whether the fundmenatals are becoming a part of their new standard.
One thing I can say about why this project is so exciting is that they were wowed when we worked towards strengthening those weak sentences and after we made these sentences better, they had a look, an expression of now understanding something they didn’t know they didn’t know.
On Education: Curriculum, Equity & Public Education 