What is keeping people down? Is it The Man, or those who struggle against The Man? Arguably, those who struggle against The Man, by virtue of being completely deluded, are keeping their intended beneficiaries down.
Greg Kane, Baltimore Sun
What was the reason for abandoning the no-social-promotion policy?
Our peerless leaders - peerless because there's not another group like
them, and other school systems should be thankful for that - discovered
that the policy meant not only that some students would have to repeat
a grade once.
They might have to repeat a grade - horror of horrors! - twice. Oh, the humanity!
So rather than hold students back a second time, school officials
promoted them. But they had a plan. Because the schools were unable to
teach them what they were supposed to know in nine months, our leaders
provided flunking students with summer learning packets, so they could
master the material in a mere six weeks.
So social promotion is now "in" again in Baltimore. Apparently, it never went out of vogue in High Point. What drives it?
It's what some conservatives have called "the soft bigotry of low
expectations." It's more like the hard bigotry of no expectations. Most
of Baltimore's students are black, as is Fantasia. Can you imagine
officials in a predominantly white system tolerating the social
promotion of thousands of white students?
There are a number
of culprits responsible for this hard bigotry of no expectations, and
black leaders aren't exempt. Black students are passed not knowing
anything because some school leaders figure - correctly - that black
leaders will accuse them of racism.
There's also what I call
the self-esteem racket. Students are promoted without knowing anything
because, some folks figure, flunking them will harm their self-esteem.
Newoldschoolteacher at Schoolnerdblog:
Ok. So then we read a very inflammatory article about the "pedagogy of
poverty." I won't go into it, because it was another one of those "our
public schools are trying to control the students' minds. We should let
them be free!" Really this is not the issue. Also, the guy says that if
you want a highly disciplined school, you may or may not be a bigot. He
actually used the word bigot.
We got onto the topic of cultural
advantages that middle class kids have, such as listening to their
parents discuss different issues, going to museums, having more books,
etc. Everyone was decrying the fact that poor kids don't have the same
things, and that they come into pre-K already behind. When they
continue falling behind, middle school and high school teachers
complain that "there just isn't enough time" to teach them,
particularly with the mandated curriculum dictated by state exams.
I
pointed out that, if what people were saying was correct, then that
would mean that urban kids should have more time in the classroom,
longer school days, and longer school years. This would allow them to
catch up and give their teachers the chance to cover everything they
wanted. I provided the KIPP schools as an example of a school system
that does this, and gets amazing results. It works. More time in school
and good instruction works.
My instructor was not pleased with
this, though. He thought the idea was too "militaristic." He said, "I
mean, what's the end goal?" I was flabbergasted, once again. Doesn't
anyone get it? The goal is to give kids the skills and knowledge they
need to choose the kind of lives they want to live. Period, end of
story, I no longer want to talk to you, stupid idiot. But he has this
whole notion of making people "good citizens" or getting them to "think
critically" about the world. Ask yourself, what would you want for your
child? Would you want her to get a great academic education and be able
to do whatever she wanted, or would you want someone to teach her "how
to be a good citizen" or "how to think critically"? I know, me too. And
if the chips were down, my instructor would admit the same thing. The
fact is that schools like KIPP are vaulting kids OUT OF POVERTY.
They're giving them a fighting chance. And the concept of the schools
is not that complex. Their motto is: Work hard. Be nice. And everything
boils down to that in the end. There's no magic curriculum bullet. It's
just hard work. This guy, this instructor, he so decries poverty and
"keeping poor kids poor" and "the pedagogy of poverty" but it is HIS
reluctance to accept WHAT WORKS FOR KIDS that keeps them where they are.
I really don't understand. And I'm so angry about it.
Jia-Rui Chiong, Los Angeles Times
Researchers who study the issue of racial disparities in academic
performance say that even they have to be careful how they present data.
Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University in
Philadelphia, and his colleagues wanted to look at factors, including
race, that affected student achievement several years ago. "We were
nervous about how people would react, that we'd be accused of being
prejudiced," he said. "There's nothing nice you can say about this
that's going to make people feel good."
Steinberg and his colleagues found that even after economics were
controlled for, Asian and Asian American students performed better on
tests than any other racial group. Latinos and African Americans
performed the least well.
Steinberg's research further suggested that an "attitudinal
profile" influenced academic success, and that Asians tended to have
the most students that fit the profile.
The first variable wasn't parental involvement, as Zhou concluded,
but something more subtle: parental expectation. Steinberg asked
students what was the worst grade they could get without their parents
getting angry. For Asian children, it was a B-plus; for Latino and
African American children, it was a C.
Another factor was that Asian children in the study were more
likely to associate with peers who valued high marks in school, whereas
Latino and African American students were more likely to have friends
who put less stock in good grades.
Steinberg found two other differences that seemed linked to
success. Asian children were much more likely to attribute their grades
to hard work rather than aptitude. They also were more likely to
believe that doing poorly in school would harm their chances for
success in life.
"If you have these four things, it doesn't matter what ethnic
group you're from, you'll do well in school," Steinberg said. "It's
just more common among Asian kids and less common among black and
Latino kids."
Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at the Metropolitan Center for Urban
Education at New York University, believes class plays more of a role
than Steinberg does. He points to a mostly Asian high school in San
Francisco with a high dropout rate. "They're not dropping out because
they're not sufficiently Chinese, but mainly because their parents put
an emphasis on work."
Noguera also suggested that Latino parents may be less adept at
navigating the American school system and advocating on their
children's behalf.
"It's not that they don't value education," Noguera said. "They're
putting too much trust in the schools. That's a big mistake."
Schoolnerdblog:
I would like someone to guess the approximate grade level of the book
the 11th graders in my school's humanities class are reading.
No, guess lower.
Barnes and Noble dubs it a "book for young readers," appropriate for 3rd-6th graders.
I
wonder: are there colleges nowadays that use books for young readers,
or in the case of the more academic colleges, books written for grades
7 and 8? We should look into that.
Steven Pinker indirectly:
An understanding of the mind as a complex system shaped by evolution
runs against [The blank slate, the noble savage, etc.] The alternative has emerged from the
work of cognitive scientists such as Susan Carey, Howard Gardner ,and
David Geary. Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing
the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a
technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately
bad at.... Because much of the content of education is not cognitively
natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and
pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children may
be innately motivated to make friends, acquire status, hone motor
skills, and explore the physical world, but they are not necessarily
motivated to adapt their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like
formal mathematics. A family, a peer group, and culture that ascribe
high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the
motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards
are apparent only over the long term.
Schoolnerdblog: teaching a lesson in a progressive school
They are open to my suggestions, up to a point.
For example, the
[11th grade] kids' writing is terrible. I mean scary terrible. One essay I just read
was almost unintelligible, in that the students' words seemed to have
been scattered randomly throughout the "sentence," which went on for
like four lines and counted as a paragraph. The girl is bright and
articulate, and to my knowledge does not have any type of learning
disability.
I suggested I could do some mini grammar lessons in
class, and my teacher thought it was a nice idea. She does support the
idea of grammar, and recognizes that the kids are pretty weak writers.
Although I don't think she has the same fear in her heart that I do for
them. But the thing is, she won't let me give any grammar quizzes. The
school as a whole is sort of "against" quizzes, although some teachers
use them I guess. It's difficult to assess whether the kids have
learned the specific principle you taught when you can't quiz them on
it specifically. Also, there is every reason for the kids to tune out
when I try to teach it to them, since they are not really accountable.
...
The themes for this unit (colonial founding through the early American period) are roughly as follows:
- the racialization of savagery
- race as a social construct
- what freedom means to different peoples
It's
difficult to find room in there for things like a) the development of
the colonies, b) events leading to the revolution, c) ideas leading to
the revolution, d) dissent regarding the revolution, e) the war itself.
I would imagine that the kids have had many classes based
around themes like this. One girl said in class today, "how come we
always have to learn about race?" Not that it isn't an important topic,
especially in American history, but I think the sentiment stemmed from
theme overload.
Another hint that they haven't really learned
a great deal of content, in the past or so far this year, is that they
don't know a lot of content. I'm pretty sure a lot of them don't know
what "Europe" is, or at least the difference between "Europe" and
"England." When I talk to them, they try to reconstruct the facts of
history logically, from the themes we learned about.
My
teachers and others want kids to understand the "big ideas" in history,
rather than memorizing facts and details. But I just don't think you
can teach these big ideas directly. They are empty and meaningless by
themselves. You teach the small stories, the facts, the dates, the
chronology, the events, and then out of these, patterns begin to
emerge. That's the beautiful part, when the students start to see them.
It's like giving them tree after tree after tree, and suddenly they
realize it's a forest. Or it's like that painting, by...Seurat? The one
with all the little dots. There is no picture without all the dots!
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