Fantastic 5

"Most of these students would probably not succeed in day school for the simple reason that day school was not set up for them. It would not meet their needs and did not have what it took to work with them; unfortunately neither did the afternoon school." - p.72, Casella "Being Down"

One of the readings that especially struck me this weak was "Race War: Policing, Incarceration, and the Containment of Black Youth," by Bakari Kitwana because it embodies an intersection of a lot of my studies in health and education.  I took Anthropology of AIDS last year, and we often talked about how the "war on drugs" proved to be catastrophic in raising incarceration rates and HIV and AIDS transmission rates within the black community.  I was especially struck by the increase of "707 percent" (Kitwana 5268*) within the 10 year period and I can imagine that the rates are only higher now, since that statistic is now twenty years old.  

"Mastery is 'not doing more with less,' Masch says. 'They're doing more with more.'" (Denvir September 24, 2014).

How can the government demand a certain score on a test from all students when closing the achievement gap isn't based on these arbitrary test scores? There are other more pressing factors that relate to this educational achievement gap that these tests will never solve. 

"The United States should not use one hand to blame the schools for inadequately serving disadvantaged children when its social policies have helped create these disadvantages - especially income disadvantages - with the other hand." (City Kids, City Schools, p.225)

I really enjoyed Sue Books' "What Teachers Need to Know About Poverty." I thought it was a powerful and dynamic summary of the hardships faced by students in low income schools and I appreciated the way she outlined what makes an effective teacher for those students. I particuarly appreciated the line, "Many children who grow up in poverty thrive despite tremendous hardships. This testifies to the amazing strength of their young spirits, but cannot, or ought not, be used as a reason to deny the profound significance of poverty in young lives." (185). I think there is a common assumption that it is the childrens' responsibility to succeed and the American Dream influences this assumption. It posits that, if a person wills success, he or she will achieve it.

"In 2010, State Attorney General Tom Corbett was elected as governor, his political network heavily populated by advocates for private-sector education reform. Backed by a conservative state legislature, Corbett cut about $860 million from public education in his first budget rather than tax the state’s booming natural-gas industry. He also expanded Pennsylvania’s “voucher lite” programs, popular among conservatives, which provide corporations with major tax credits in exchange for donations for private-school tuition.

There were two quotes that stood out to me in the readings and while not directly related represent opposite parts of a spectrum relating to how teachers interact with and view thier studnets. The first quote is from Noguera's introduction in City Kids, City Schools where he says "teachers who take time to know thier studnets are compelled to engage in an ongoing process of learning and inquiry, because the children they serve are not static or "knowable" in an anthropological sense.

In the Chemerinsky reading, I was struck by the influence of choice upon resegregation of schools. According to the reading, "Some school boards adopted so-called 'freedom of choice' plans which allowed students to choose the school where they would enroll and resulted in continuted segregation." This began after the Brown vs. Board of Education 1954 decision, but is still in practice to this day. I have always been a proponent of choice as I myself attended a choice school and benefited greatly from it. However, though it has occured to me that choice may play a role in resegregation, I had not realized that it's origins were directly correlated to white students leaving schools that were being desegregated. I question whether this was the first instance of this practice.

"These decisions are wrong--tragically wrong in holding that there is not a fundamental right to education."  (Chemerinsky, 1613)