Teach for America

(Recommended by Larry)

"The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher’s unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education—and the role of public school teachers—in a deeply unequal society."

Read here: http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/teach-for-america/

Race and Ethnicity in an Integrated School

Blogpost: Race and Ethnicity in an Integrated School
By Spencer Pforsich

Another perspective on how important (and difficult) it is to find constructive and supportive ways to talk about race & ethnicity in our schools:

It was February 2008 at High Tech High. As my first period students arrived and settled in, I distributed copies of an email the entire faculty received the evening before from celebrateblackhistry@gmail.com. The email, signed only “Concerned Student,” expressed outrage because the author felt not enough attention had been paid school-wide to Black History Month, currently in its last week. It read, “I’m not saying that every teacher in this whole school needs to drop whatever they already have planned and change the curriculum to do ONLY Black History, but people need to do something.” 

... 

“Let’s pause here for a moment,” I said. “Look around the room at who has done most of the talking. Also look around at whose voices you haven’t heard.” As students slowly took this in, a few surprised sounds and awkward giggles emerged. They began to notice, as I had, that almost every student who had spoken throughout the conversation had been white; about half the class had remained silent. The two black students had said nothing. 

One point from the email that the students hadn’t addressed was a sentence that read, “I’m choosing to be anonymous because I don’t feel I can talk to a teacher or my advisor about this.” In our small school, many of us felt that the best part about it was the close-knit sense of community that we could create. The thought that there were possibly students here who didn’t feel comfortable approaching their teachers about issues that mattered to them was deeply alarming to me—and I began to question why my classroom had such conspicuously silent voices.

Race vs. Class: The False Dichotomy

Article: "Race vs. Class: The False Dichotomy"

By SHERRILYN A. IFILL

I don't have a conclusive position on affirmative action, but the two things from this editorial that spoke to me are that:

1) Race and Class are often pitted against each other as if we can or should only examine one issue at a time.  

2) On the contrary, because of how interrelated the issues are, I do believe that we need to be working on multiple fronts at a time... and that to do so doesn't necessarily have to mean that we're diluting our efforts or that we're not acknowledging the relative importance of the issues.

What we might learn from the decades-long (and painfully incomplete) experience of desegregation is the need to deploy multiple efforts to address a chronic problem. In the context of higher education, that menu of efforts should include considering income (if not wealth), as well as an aggressive campaign to raise the quality of K-12 public education.

I know that these points - particularly the second one - seem fairly obvious, but it's one that I've had to grapple with a lot myself this year, since I tend to want to work on issues in a linear, hierarchical fashion.  And unfortunately, real life and circumstances doesn't work like that.

Availability/Accessibility of Tutors as an example of a class divide

Article: Some Tutors Are Shouldering a Wider Load

By ABBY ELLIN

Published: December 14, 2012

Instead of just helping a student catch up, a new sort of tutor has taken on duties of therapists, personal assistants and even parents.

 

I'm posting this article because it reminded me of a common argument that's made in urban education, which is - "The parents aren't doing enough.  Families need to do more and get more involved in their children's education."  But according to this article, it seems like the parents at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum aren't doing more - they're in fact doing less.  The only difference is that they have the money to pay somebody to pick up the slack for them.  Again, another example of a class divide in the success of students in schools and in higher education.

Original Article: Please Stop Using the Phrase 'Achievement Gap'

Here is Camika Royal's original article on the phrase "achievement gap".

ARTICLE: "Please Stop Using the Phrase 'Achievement Gap'

Here's the beginning of her piece...

Recently, I've been more and more troubled with the phrase "achievement gap." I was a 1999 Teach For America corps member and recently, in my occasional work with the organization, I've begun to share my concerns about what this concept suggests.

Because of America's racial history and legacy, the cross-racial comparison that holds up white student achievement as the universally standard goal is problematic. Further, the term "achievement gap" is inaccurate because it blames the historically marginalized, under-served victims of poor schooling and holds whiteness and wealth as models of excellence. And, as with all misnomers, the thinking that undergirds the achievement gap only speaks of academic outcomes, not the conditions that led to those outcomes, nor does it acknowledge that the outcomes are a consequence of those conditions.

I'm still mulling over what I think about her comments, but here's one quote that I thought was really powerful: "Words count because they indicate place, position, and power."

Stop using the phrase "achievement gap"

Blogpost: "Camika Royal Responds to Critics"
(via Diane Ravitch's blog)
Camika Royal, a historian of education and Teach for America alum, write a provocative post in which she called on people to stop using the term “achievement gap.” In her original post, she said the term is offensive and demeaning and explained why. The post generated many responses. I invited Dr. Royal to respond to her critics, and she does so here.

I haven't read Camika Royal's original post about the term "achievement gap", but here are the two quotes I found particularly striking from her post here:

The first quote...
This is why when people suggest the difference in test scores between Whites and Asians is an “achievement gap” that supposedly disparages Whites, thus disproving the argument of Anglo-normativity, it does not. Even within the comparison of White and Asian students’ test scores, Whites’ test scores are seen as normal and Asians’ high test scores are seen as exotic and exceptional, hence the model minority myth. Both the so-called achievement gap and the model minority myth are racist constructs.

and

The second quote...
This messiah complex compels top-down reforms and resists partnerships with parents and listening to communities because these reformers truly believe they know best. Education reform fueled by martyrdom and the messiah complex is missing the mark. One of my mentors, Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, said recently, “Catching up is made nearly impossible by our structural inequalities.” In agreement with her and with you, Dr. Ravitch, I believe that until education reform corrects structural inequalities teeming in under-resourced, historically marginalized communities, education reform will continue to fall short of its goal.

How Washington, D.C., Schools Cheat Their Students Twice

ARTICLE: "How Washington, D.C., Schools Cheat Their Students Twice"by CALEB ROSSITER
Kids who fail their courses go to phony Credit Recovery classes. No wonder so many high-school graduates are at or near a fifth-grade level.(Originally on WSJ.com, via Diane Ratvitch's blog)

I see this phenomenon in my school too!  Personally, I'm not convinced that computer-based lessons are actually able to teach students to fully understand content.  I'm not saying that any teacher is better than a computer program - there are definitely a lot of bad teachers out there who essentially just babysit the students - but in terms of actual learning (by which I mean comprehension and not just being able to click the right answers on the "assessment" at the end of the program), I just don't see how a computer program can help students reach their full potential.

Beyond Black and White in the Mississippi Delta

ARTICLE: "Beyond Black and White in the Mississippi Delta"

by Gene Dattel

In three small-town Southern elections, community and trust trumped race.
This op-ed doesn't really delve into any real issues, but I thought that the way the author articulated the following comment was nice:

Each of these towns experienced the civil rights movement. They also experienced mechanization, which displaced the black labor force. When the promise of the civil rights revolution was challenged by the realities of deindustrialization, hope was replaced by disappointment and disillusionment. The moral clarity of the struggle against legal segregation was replaced by de facto segregation and self-segregation — a problem hardly unique to the South.

It reminded me of the conversation we had last week, where Ann was talking about how students don't think about all the reasons behind the surface "reality" of what their observations.  Similarly, I think that when people talk about problems rising from racial discrimination, they often don't think about how class/the economy compounds/compounded those issues.  The article I posted before about the housing market also speaks to this point.

Speaking in Colors: A Window into Uncomfortable Conversations about Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Bilingual Classrooms

ARTICLE: "Speaking in Colors: A Window into Uncomfortable Conversations about Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Bilingual Classrooms"
by Tatyana Kleyn

(Shared by Larry)
I am attaching a short piece on a study dealing with race in bilingual classrooms.

"The Liberal Gloat"

ARTICLE: "The Liberal Gloat"

by Ross Douthat

I'm posting this opinion piece, because I think that this opinion piece and one of the comments responding to it, were both very thought-provoking.

In his editorial, Douthat posits a common refrain/warning that Republicans make, namely that: 

     [There is a ] growing failure of America’s local associations — civic, familial, religious — to 
    foster stability, encourage solidarity and make mobility possible.

To his credit, this piece isn't a mindless attack on liberals, per se, but still, the arguments he makes seemed a bit skewed.Then I read one of the comments responding to the article and I felt like it did a good job of explaining what I was thinking:

• winiznayne
• albuquerque, nm

NYT Pick

The problem with the right is that they see the failure of social institutions as the cause of societal decay instead of the other way around. It's not the failure of the family, community, church that is the core of the problem. The core of the problem, (and the cause of the downfall of these institutions) is the rising inequality enacted by thirty years of Republican policies of deregulation, tax cuts, union busting, etc.

Republican economic policy is completely at odds with conservative social positions. It's an economic policy that openly embraces inequality and a social policy that demands that people help themselves. A policy that embraces privatization of everything, forcing people to make more purchases of every day products, but one that resists wage increases among workers at every point. The list goes on.

These contradictions breed a cynical attitude among society. Low-wage families can't thrive under such pressures, and churches refuse to acknowledge the insensitivity and absurdity of these policies. It is really hard not to see the Republican party, and conservatives in general, as a group of out of touch elitists who can't seem to understand why poor people aren't richer, why immigrants aren't maintaining families, why working-class people aren't intellectual. The core of the problem is the economics. Focus on the inequality, not the ramifications.

What do you guys think?