In this piece, Shor makes the argument that "education is politics" and that it is important for schools to set an environment where children are able to question what they know and grow intellectually as well as individuals. Shor also presents us with the idea that upper-class students are provided with a higher quality education than those who are lower-income and working class;
funding is another political dimension of education, because more money has always been invested in the education of upper-class children and elite collegians than has been spent on students from lower-income homes and in community colleges.
This article talks about the impact of bad facilities on students and their learning.
A number of studies have shown that many school systems, particularly those in urban and high-poverty areas, are plagued by decaying buildings that threaten the health, safety, and learning opportunities of students. Good facilities appear to be an important precondition for student learning, provided that other conditions are present that support a strong academic program in the school. A growing body of research has linked student achievement and behavior to the physical building conditions and overcrowding.
The physical state of a school building and the conditions described above are directly linked to the amount of funding a school gets.
The article also argues that it is
Schools need to be defended as an important public service that educates students to be critical citizens who can think, challenge, take risks, and believe that their actions will make a difference in the larger society.
This goes back to Christensen who fights for students' rights to stand up for what they believe in and analyze what they are being taught. Christensen wants schools to enable children to think out of the box and not to take the education they are being spoon fed sitting down; she wants them to be well-rounded citizens with a mind of their own, and to have the ability to stand up for their values and culture.
While reading Kliewer's piece, a few thoughts came into my mind. It was kind of a hard piece for me to get through at first, but a few quotes caught my interest.
…society itself is hurt when schools act as cultural sorting machines-locations that "justify a competitive ethic that margmalizes certain students or groups of students ... [that]legitimize discrimination and devaluation on the basis of the dominant society's preferences in matters of ability, gender, ethnicity, and race ... and [that] endorse an elaborate process of sorting by perceived ability and behavior" (p. 183).
I have to agree with this. Schools today that "degrade" or do not value students who are of a different race, ability, gender, etc can really affect society and their success in the "real world", once they graduate from school. People with different abilities than others are sometimes placed in self-contained classes where they are separated from mainstreamed classes. This can cause them to fall behind their peers and they may not be able to gain the same set of skills as their mainstreamed peers.
Another quote that I connected to was:
It's not like they come here to be labeled, or to believe the label. We're all here-kids, teachers, parents, whoever-it's about all of us working together, playing together, being together, and that's what learning is. Don't tell me any of these kids are being set up to fail.
I found this to be a somewhat powerful quote. I love how this educator makes it a point to make sure that all her students are included and involved, and not secluded. Her goal is to make sure that all her children will go on to be as successful in the big world as possible.
In ""Literacy With an Atitude", Patrick Finn argues that there are two different types of education. Domesticating Education provides students with skills to become literate and dependable; skills that will make them hard-working and functional contributors to society. Empowering education, on the other hand, gives students skills that will allow them to obtain positions of authority and power. Finn says that those who have access to more money or are well off (higher class) are the ones who can get an empowering education. Working class students are subjected to Domesticating education. Finn says that when poor children get access to an empowering education, they "get literacy with an attitude". Unlike upper class people, these people grow up with more challenges and therefore use their empowering education to fight for justice and equality.
There are many connections to Delpit throughout this piece. Delpit says that it is fvery important to express rules and codes of power clearly to maximize a student's potential. Finn shows us how critical it is to do this:
All of us-teachers and students-were locked into a system of rules and roles that none of us understood and that did not allow for much in the way of education.
It is very hard to learn and interact when you don't understand rules and codes of power. Throughout the rest of this piece Finn gives examples of how clearly stating rules and regulations improves the quality of a child's education and the way the classroom is run.
He did circle activities where each student was asked to share a personal fact or opinion and he insisted on the following ground rules. No put-downs. Listen. Don't interrupt. Everyone gets a turn (including the teacher). Everyone gets equal time. Everyone has the right to pass. Once they were understood, these ground rules became classroom rules for the entire school day-for the teacher as well as the students.
Johnson (or anti-Johnson): Johnson states that it is important to speak explicitly about race, gender, sexuality, and ultimately about privilege, power and differences in society. I also think this is important, because if we are not able to discuss these topics, people will never be comfortable with them and future generations will never learn and be able to think out of the box. I had an incident in my seventh grader's History class when the children were debating whether a word being used was "racist" or not. The teacher told them to "stop using that word; I don't want to hear anymore of this 'racist' stuff." This shut down a potentially informative conversation and told children that they could not explicitly talk about race/racism.
Delpit: Delpit believes that it is important for educators to state clearly what the rules and codes of power are. This is critical for a person's success in society. My student's science teacher is great at this; she tells students "we are not talking right now. We are writing outlines." or "you are not supposed to be standing. You need to sit down." She is clear and explicit with what she wants her students to do.
August: August says that marginalized students need to feel included and "normalized" within schools. We do this by preventing them from feeling erased and invisible. I see this a lot when teachers and students alike openly greet my student with warmth, and don't treat her differently despite her blindness. Students are quick to invite her to work in groups with them and are very friendly.
While I listened to episode number 562 of "This American Life", I was outraged at the fact that we are in the TWENTY FIRST century and students are still struggling to have an equal opportunity to education,, essentially because of their race. When the parents were having their meeting in the gym during this episode of the podcast, I was so angry that they were treating the children from the other school as if they they were savage, violent people when in reality they were just the same as their own kids, with the only difference being the amount of opportunities to succeed being far less (due to poor teaching, old/run down/broken facilities ETC). To me this scene sounded very much like one that would have gone on fifty or so years ago, not something that should be happening now! I was especially angry when a parent said that the arguments they were making were not about race and that she was angry/tired of people making it about race, when the things that all the parents were yelling about were things that racist people decades ago would have been saying, word for word. This goes back to Johnson, who argues that people should be talking about sex/gender/race/racism/disability explicitly and not hiding it behind other terms. If these parents, as children, had been told explicitly what racist comments are and how people with colored skin are not different from themselves, they would most likely not be making arguments and painful accusations like they were int this scene. The parent that spoke about the issue not being about race, and the rest of the parents who cheered in agreement, did not understand that what they were doing and saying was wrong on so many levels, partially because they were never taught. On a similar note, Bob Herbert states that
What I think is a shame is that we have to do all of this humiliating dancing around the perennially
uncomfortable issue of race. We pretend that no one’s a racist anymore, but it’s easier to talk about pornography in polite company than racial integration.
Why is race still such an uncomfortable subject for us today, after our long history of fighting racism and discussing it throughout the years? Why can nobody be explicit about race, and own up to an argument or action being racist, instead of glossing over it like the parent above did? I am hoping that as the years and generations go by, this will change.
In the second episode of this podcast, they spoke briefly about how years down the line things would change so that parents would want their children to be integrated within schools and experience life with students of different races. This reminded me of Delpit; the rules would change along with the codes of power. Instead of white parents having the majority of the power and being able to say "no, we don't want these children who are poor/of a different race to go to our schools" and moving away when integration starts to occur, they will want to send their children to these schools, because facilities will have improved, along with the quality of teaching. An example of this is the school in Connecticut which has amazing facilities and children and teachers who are eager and happy to be there. These are the types of schools we need to have more of.
I went to a public school that had a great culture and was very diverse in terms of different races/ethnic backgrounds, and it was very surprising and shocking to me when I heard the first episode that segregation is something that still goes on in public schools. Throughout my whole life, my elementary, middle and high schools had a big range of nationalities so I have to say I was ignorant to the other types of schools/situations that are still in abundance in the United states, according to this podcast.
Here is a video that explains how segregation in schools is not improved from sixty years ago.
In this piece, the authors discuss the reasons for service learning, as well as its affects on the community and students. First of all, I really agree with what they are saying here. I have only done service learning for a few weeks so far, but I'm learning a lot from working with my seventh grader, while also feeling great about doing as much as I can to help her with her classes and any other issues she is having in school. Kahne and Westheimer write:
…such service learning activities seek to promote students' self-esteem, to develop higher-order thinking skills, to make use of multiple abilities, and to provide authentic learning experiences
The service learning project we are participating in definitely does all of these, especially the latter. Working in a school environment definitely helps to prepare me for what I want to do in the future. It is getting me a preview of what it will be like to work with different types of students, and teachers as well. I'm switching from classroom to classroom throughout the day, so I am able to watch different teaching methods.
I really love the section in this piece about the students who were nervous about going to a school in a poor neighborhood. I was angry at how they automatically assumed that the children would be "rude, tough, noisy, and very unfriendly", as well as "mean, gang-related blacks". The part that I loved was where they came back from the service learning project with a whole new perspective; the stereotypes they had were dispelled. This is why I think service learning projects are important, and should be encouraged in middle and high schools. It provides students with different opportunities to work with a variety of people and to lessen, if not eliminate stereotypes and prejudices completely. It gives privileged students a chance to see what life is like for people who are not as fortunate as them.
While I read, I was reminded of this episode of The World's Strictest Parents, where rebellious teenagers are sent to "strict" households in an attempt to change their ways of life and attitudes. There was a scene in this particular episode where the boy, Andrew, was made to volunteer at a homeless shelter, serving food. He was quickly humbled and was able to appreciate the lesson he was being taught. The concept in this show is different from the idea of service learning, however I made a connection between the way he was exposed to a different way of life and developed morally, with the intention for students who participate in service learning to learn from, while helping those who are in need.
In Christensen's piece, she discusses how media content effects children in different ways. She
cleaned the dwarves' house and waited for Prince Charming to bring me life: (Christensen 1)
This is an example of how movies, especially Disney movies, can create unrealistic and sometimes unhealthy expectations for young children. In Ashly's blog post, she uses a great quote to support this:
Movies depict everyday life, but often everyday life is the way it is because of the lifestyles, habits and expectations that movies and shows and other types of media bring up. Ashly also makes a great point: she says that movies are very often a representation of the movie creator's views and prejudices, and that in turn can cause the viewers to start thinking or believing in the same things that are being shown, in which case they are essentially beginning to take on the beliefs and ideas of the creator. This is something that I have never considered before when watching a movie.
Christensen uuses the frase "secret education" while refering to what children learn from cartoons, shows and movies. This is a very accurate way to describe it, in my opinion. Girls will learn that is important to be skinny, white, and pretty if they compare themselves to the female characters that Disney has portrayed in the past. Christensen says that the actions of the minor characters in movies, such as what they are singing, what kinds of jobs they are doing, can say a lot about what the movie is trying to say about that type of person. For example, if a person who is overweight is depicted as unintelligent or as a buffoon, then children can infer that people of a similar build are below people who are skinny. HERE is a video of 10 movie stareotypes, which I will also imbed below.
