No matter how tough politicians and education pundits talk the obstacles remain. Massachusetts is a good example. The Boston Globe reports that among third graders last year, minority and low income students were twice as likely as white students to score lowest in the state's standardized tests. These are discouraging numbers for everyone, and they are pretty much replicated nationally. They raise the question: Why after all these years of No Child Left Behind are we still struggling to achieve parity between rich and poor students, between white and minority children?
Nobody is satisfied with our schools, and there's blame all round as experts scramble for solutions: We label schools as failing. We fire whole teachings staffs. We tweak curricula. We script teachers' every moves. We increase the school day and student seat time at the expense of art, music and recreation. Still things don't improve.
Maybe we're not listening to the right people. Somebody like Dick Gregory, for example. Yeah, Dick Gregory. You may remember him (if you're old enough) -- African American comedian, civil rights activist, 1968 presidential candidate, author, and nutrition guru? His list of accomplishments doesn't include education specialist, but he knew quite a lot about why schools fail and about the "achievement gap." He went to one of those failing schools and was trapped in that gap.
Most of my students -- kids serving time in an adult county jail where I taught high school --didn't know who Dick Gregory was when I announced that we were going to read a short chapter entitled "Shame" from his autobiography. At first they weren't interested. They assumed (like so many teenagers) that the reading, any reading would be boring. Then when I mentioned that he was black, and had marched with Dr. King there was a spark of curiosity. It was enough to get us into the chapter. After that they were hooked.
In a page and a half, Gregory tells the reader (and America if we would only listen) why poor kids of color fail in school. In heartbreaking detail he writes about being in the third grade filled with shame -- the shame of poverty, of being a "welfare kid," of being abandoned by his father, of living in the projects, of wearing dirty clothes because once again there wasn't any hot water, of having little food, and of living with rats and bugs.
When my locked-up students read that he was a "troublemaker" in school, the little kid who spent more time in the corner facing the wall than he did at his desk, none of them was surprised. And when Gregory wonders out loud why the teacher didn't understand that maybe he caused trouble not because he was bad or stupid but because he was poor and hungry and too tired to concentrate you could hear the whispered, "Ya got that right," followed by, "bitch" when she berates him in front of the class, talking about "you and your kind."
The reading may seem dated to those of us comfortable with the gifts of life; after all that was back in the late '30s. But my students had no problem with what Gregory described. Most of them lived similar lives, although I would venture to say, much harsher and more embattled ones. They grew up in neighborhoods overrun with drugs, guns and random violence, in households fractured by unemployment, disease and substance abuse. My students went to schools that never had enough books or supplies or staff to go around, in falling down buildings in neighborhoods unsafe to walk. A friend of mine works in a school where it's not unusual that kids can't play outside at recess because of drive-by-shootings.
If it wasn't good in Dick Gregory's day, it's far from good for minority students today. The 2010 Census confirms this: Black children are three times as likely to be poor as white children. Forty percent of black children are born into poor families compared with 8 percent of white children. An even more alarming statistic is that an African American boy born in the past decade has a 1-in-3 chance of being incarcerated in his lifetime.
There's a poignant moment in Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools when he goes into an East St. Louis grade school classroom that is dirty, dilapidated, and overcrowded. At one point Kozol reports that as he came into a classroom a young boy looked up at him with an expression that asked, "What did I do to deserve this?" The "achievement gap" -- which is just that young boy's unspoken question in a different form -- will never be closed until our policymakers, educational and otherwise, aggressively address the underlying issues of poverty and racism that cripple every aspect of poor and minority children's lives. Maybe those policymakers need to stop talking and listen for a change to people who know a lot more than they do about failing schools, and about failing lives.
Originally posted on Beacon Broadside
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Gary M. Ratner: What's Wrong with NCLB? False Premises and Harmful Effects
Of course an educational system aimed at feeding people facts with the expectation of them reporting the facts back at test time would quite unlikely be inspiring! Hence the poor performance of the impoverished relative to the not so impoverished.
This is not good news for the education system! But what makes it even worse is that those who are not so impoverished don’t find the learning experience meaningful either; they just don’t feel as trapped by their life-situation.
All children enter the educational system with an inherent thirst for learning, sadly most leave the system with it squelched. What is needed is total re-thinking of the system itself.
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2011/02/10/better-thinking-leads-to-better-solutions/
I taught in a very poor, majority immigrant school in CA where the students scored poorly on all state standardized tests. However, the dedication, service, and instructional aptitude of the teachers in that small district was exceptional to say the least. It wasn't the union's fault, the teachers' fault, or the administration's, as each of these groups worked endlessly on how to help the children socially, emotionally and pedagogically. It is the issue of poverty, and all the problems that it entails, that plagued this community plain and simple. The fact that these children grow up without the social, economic and political capital that middle class America does inhibits their chances of academic success before they even begin school. The solution: politicians that refocus the country on the real reason for the achievement gap. Until then, it will just be the same old thing wrapped in a new policy that does nothing.
try it like this, i bare no personal responsibility for the intuitive relationship that production as a product creates. i bare not the stigma of intellectual laziness just because i choose not to quantify the quantities that identify my agenda. i dont bare the burden of creating an avenue to self-sufficiency and investment through mutuality and identification. I am aware that the only way to reconcile oppression by race is through mutuality, but perfer to defer to the "peace and order" which affirm the state of mind known as freedom rather than our ascent to equitable laws and enforcement. i know i endorse the status quo indirectly when i harbor platitudes that create ambiguity where justice should prevail, but charity is much easier to fail at then justice. i understand the difference between myself and those that ask societies derelicted to stomach the absurd comes down to unconditional love, i just dont care.
there, now you can say you acknowledged why our world didn't turn out to be one we wanted to live in... or
call the ethical bankruptcy what it is and gather the necessary resources to dispatch it. i would start with a review of legal and administrative authority and a bible of characters and settings which affirm learning and accreditation.
The blame game obsession is insidious. Focusing on fixing the problem instead of fixing blame would go a long way, but that shows no signs of happening. Sorry, kids.
Ignoring reception while rearranging delivery deck chairs perpetuates the lack of success, not because the components you cite are ineffective in and of themselves, but because they are only half of the equation. Until the receiving end is addressed in some way, the full benefit of delivery aspects simply won't be realized.
Instead of blaming kids or their families or poverty for the difficulties, how about helping kids better receive their education, thereby providing them with the keys to give them a shot at escaping poverty?
I am in no way minimizing poverty or the shame that goes with it. Being homeless, jobless, and about to go under completely, I intimately know both the brutality and the shame of poverty because I live it every second. Instead of just complaining about it, however, I want to DO something about it.
But nobody's listening to me, either. http://bit.ly/hWykye
Yes, poverty dead-end students' lives, just as it's about to dead-end mine. But endlessly proclaiming that poverty is the problem (which is a central tenet to the teacher meta-message) plays straight into the hands of the cold-hearted idea that poverty is just an excuse.
As to your marathon analogy, I would adjust it a bit. It's not about URGING that person to win, but TEACHING that person how to get as much out of whatever abilities they have so that they may use them to the best of their ability. This is what I have addressed: http://bit.ly/9xOYch
What is the alternative? No matter how much anybody screams, blames, or cries foul, the race is NOT going to be canceled. So what to do?
Yes, the deck is stacked against these kids, just as the deck is stacked against me. I can come up with a long list of excuses and they are all valid. But they are also worthless because one-legged or not, I have to run the damn race anyway. Or die.
The subject of poverty isn't theoretical to me. I'm living it right here right now. And it's killing me.
If poverty
Kids who grow up amidst generational poverty are the people who need to be targeted with anti-poverty measures, not people who suddenly find themselves poor, as tragic as that is.
The poverty = poor notion is misstated.
Nobody pushed me to do anything at all in school, including my teachers. I was left to rot and barely graduated. I didn't receive a single letter from any college, so that tells ya what kind of student I was in high school.
When I was teaching, it was often like looking out at a sea of mini-mes. I know exactly what teachers deal with, which is why I chose to take the course of actually helping kids better receive their education, because teachers can't do it alone. Of course, I can't do it alone, either, so I am going down fast. I don't live in Poverty, now. I live in Catastrophy. It sucks.
But we're told no explanations and no excuses.
So we continue to hammer the NCLB test prep.