Reading Paul Tough

This text has many memorable and impressive characters, ideas and quotes, and raises important questions, but it also expresses many educational ideas that really frustrate me. I'll try to focus on one: Why should we teach the poor to behave like the middle class?

One point in Friere that resonated with me is that we should not be teaching the "oppressed" to just become new "oppressors," but Canada's focus in contrast is on teaching students to be able to thrive in the "mainstream." "[We offer] resources they need to become successful middle-class adults" (39) Anything a private school can pay for, we will provide for free" (127) Obviously Canada isn't trying to make his project like an elite private school; I appreciate that Baby College instructors and staff are all people of color (95) (although it's interesting that the Board is mostly white businesspeople). And the needs are very real. (I was moved by Wyatt leading the crowd in a chant "You [prisons] Will Not Have Our Children." (16) But it seems like while potentially effective in cutting off the prison-to-pipeline for some, the success in terms of transforming society will be limited if HCZ and KIPP continue to put students in almost prison-like-disclipnarian rote-learning behavior-modification schools to teach them to behave the middle-class.

Yes, one might say that as someone raised middle-class, I have more choice to live in the "mainstream" or not and these students are deprived of that choice and that I shouldn't argue against their opportunity to gain middle-class privilege. I would counter that we live in a world of finite resources; that we will never all be able to live like today's middle class. Even with all of the world's billionaires lined up to support inner-city education in Harlem, Canada will not be able to "save the world" by giving everyone all the "resources they need to become successful middle-class adults" in the long term. 

On the other hand, the middle-class parenting values that lead to better "language skills, memory, and cogntive control" seem like good things for people to adopt. Still, other parenting styles have their own advantages. It was interesting that Tough cites Annette Lareau, who text we read in Critical Issues and who I appreciated for acknowledging the advantages of working-class parenting styles; which Tough acknowledges but shrugs off as irrelevant to thriving in our culture. (Speaking of people Tough cites; as far as researchers are concerned it is mainly economists and a few sociologists; and I think not a single teacher-researcher.)

There may be things to be learned from the middle class, but that doesn't mean mean we should focus on making everyone "middle-class." I'm trying to remember the article on "resilience-thinking" from the Education for Sustainability course as part of the 360; I feel like it would be useful here. While I'm not remembering the exact details, I feel pretty sure that Canada's rote-memorization-and-disclipinary-test-cramming style does not teach students to be resilient in an evolving world.

I've always heard of Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children's Zone project, and was interested in finding out more about it so I was excited to read Paul Tough's book. From Tough's journalism it shows that Canada truly cares about the plight of black inner-city students because he can relate to their struggles and challenges. He certainly has his own ideas about what changes in the traditional school system would make a difference in improving the quality of education for these children; i.e. longer school years, longer school days, after school programs, and parent education courses. While critiques of the system exist, the Harlem Children's Zone has been known to be a success in producing quality education for inner-city Harlem students in many respects.  

A theme in the first chapter that resonated with me was the relationship between good intentions (as embodied by Geoffrey Canada) and real outcome (as represented by the likes of benefactors on the HCZ board such as Drucken Miller). Tough writes:

The way Druckenmiller saw it, the tools of corporate America--management consultants, long-range plans, marketing data, quarterly targets--had created the strongest economy in the history of the world but in the charitable sector, those tools were being ignored in favor of guesswork and good intentions. (10)

To a certain extent, I think Druckenmiller is right. Too often, we judge programs and institutions by their good intentions and the emotional chords they strike instead of looking at the actual results they produce.  Take the public school system for example.The initial idea of government-run public schooling was based on this good intention: that every child needs and deserves to be educated. (I'd like to throw in a disclaimer that I'm not saying that I'm against this idea. I am very much for it, but against the approach that our society has been taking in order to meet it).  But the results of what public schooling has become today have not only failed to meet its good intention, but adversely, it has become an oppressive institution that helps to keep the poor poor and the wealthy rich. Reading about how desperately the parents of Harlem were hoping to  get their kids out of the public school system in Tough's book was a testimony to the failures of how public schooling has been managed in this country thus far. 

Geoffrey Canada asks some very important questions after the lottery of promise academy takes place:

"For me the big question in America is: Are we going to try to make this country a true meritocracy? Or will we forever have a class of people in America who essentially won't be able to compete because the game is fixed against them?"

The status quo of today's public schooling system is a fixed game and evidently many parents in the inner-city and their children want out. I think this is where independent start ups like charter schools play a positive role in places like the inner-city. While not all charter schools are successful, the ones that are give people living in these areas options and to them options apart from their failing local public school means hope.  But one or two charter schools like the Promise Academy in an inner-city still does not address the question that Canada raises since these schools can only take a certain amount of students.

In Belgium, their public education system works so that every student gets to choose which school they want to go to.  Instead of giving a lump sum of money to the schools (which may or may not be well-managed and run), the government gives a certain amount of money to each student to be used to get into the school of their choice. I think this is might be a model to consider emulating because it gives each student the ability to choose their own education and on top of that, the money following the student aspect keeps schools accountable in that their service to the children must be of good quality in order for the school to stay open. 

While I found the description of the development of the HCZ to be very interesting, the section that stuck out to me the most was the part on page 19 when Tough outlined the different questions that brought Canada to the development of the HCZ. In class discussions across several Ed classes, the idea has been raised that reform efforts often look for "The" solution to the problem of public education. For that reason, a single measure is deemed a success or failure without looking at the context that might lead to differences in success or without acknowledging that several factors may be at play. Therefore, I found the fact that Tough describes Canada as asking questions like "what would it take to change the lives of poor children not one by one, through heroic interventions and occassional miracles, but in a programatic, standardized way that could be applied broadly and replicated nation-wide? Was there a science to it, a formula that you could find? Which variables in a child's life did you need to change and which ones could you leave as they were?..." (19) to be very refreshing. Implicit in these questions is the idea that a single solution might not be out there, that variables shift and change depending on the students that you are working with. While the goal of Canada's reform effort may have been to find a solution that could generalize to a broader population, this goal was not approached without explicitly acknowledging that it may not be 100% possible. After reading this text, I was left wondering whether our approach to education reform needs to be changed from the beginning, with a closer look at what questions we are asking and why.

I have to admit that reading about baby college made me uneasy at times although I enjoyed reading about the goals of ensuring that parents had the adequate information to raise the children, I often wondered how the program could run better. To start at the beginning, I thought that the way in which Canada came to the idea of Baby College was very interesting; he noted that the latest buzz about vocabulary and infants had not reached the streets of Harlem. In a way he is saying that the education that swept through America's middle-class did not reach the poor. I can appreciate this because it's not saying that middle-class parents inherently knew how to raise their children, but that they had access to knowledge and resources that gave their children a leg up. I actually thought that most things at baby college are important for everybody to know, such as safety in the home. These things did not seem like white middle-class values but rather strategies that benefitted all families

It wasn't until they began talking about discipline that I began to notice how classed and racialized some parts of Baby College could be. I know that there's a lot of controversy surrounding this topic and that there are many academics that strongly condemn it, backed by research results, but after all they're still academics that often subscribe to a particular ideology (read "middle class"). I was very bothered particularly by how Carol responded to Victor's commenting about pinching his children. I felt that the exchange had strong implications for the power dynamics of Baby College, especially when Carol says, " For the record hitting, pinching, kicking, spitting, tapping, slapping- it's all abusive and Harlem Children's Zone Baby College discourages it." Carol not only completed put down Victor's parenting style but she also spoke in a way that shamed Victor and made it seem as though parents who engage in physical discipline were not acting in the spirit of Baby College. 

I think that the flaw with this thinking begins with a strong possibility of shutting people out, but also with a lack of general understanding and appreciation for other forms of child rearing. I think that there are certain forms of physical discipline such as tapping and pinching that can be productive if used right. I think that there is a way in which it instills respect for adults, not just fear in children. I think back to my experiences as a child in my family, and although I wasn't often hit, there were times in which my mom used would pinch me to make me understand. Although I can understand the benefits associated with time out and negotiation in child rearing, I also think that there's a certain way in which these forms of discipline spoil children. I'm not sure how to articulate this further, but this just brings me back to my time in school in which I would hear my middle-class white friends who never got hit be disrespectfully to their parents. Something I never did because I had a general feeling of respect and gratitude for my parents.