February 11, 2015 - 18:30
"often it is the needs of students and the inability of schools to meet those needs that cause them to be disciplined" (Noguera, 113)
This is a quote from the begining of Noguera's Schools, Prisons, and Social Implications of Punishment and is at the end of a story where an assistant principle told Noguera that "kids [who have multiple members of thier family in prison] just can't be helped" (Noguera, 112). I found this story and Noguera's subsiquent analysis to be incedibly moving because it puts a human experiance behind all of the underfunding of public schools, escpecially public schools with a majority students of color, we have been talking about. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if the assistant principle's mentality that certain kids "can't be helped" is widespread throughout city public schools and for goodness sake the kid wasn't even ten yet. This idea of giving up on people and on children deeply distrubs me. What does it mean that as a society we are giving up on kids who need the most help before they go through puberty!?
This story reminds me of my experiacne volunteering in a vocation high school in Israel for arab kids that had been exspelled from other schools. Almost all of the students came from an impoversihed and ghettoized area of the city where they were denied basic public services such as trash collection and paving roads. Many of the students faced some kind of abuse as home and some were seperated from members of thier famliy in the west bank. The school only existed because a youth movement had created it and ran it. Without the school almost all of the students would have no where to go and these kids weren't stupid, they just had never recieved the support and help they needed.
There are many complex issues in these stories and how and why schools give up on thier students but a direct connection can be made between politicains decision to cut funding for public schools (or pushing for the creation of charters which as we know has the effect of cutting funding from public schools) and the lack of resources city public schools that serve poor communites of color have. This lack of funding directly contributes to the lack of resources that these students that have the greatest needs have and serves a major role in schools giving up on these students. Thus, I would argue that cuting funding from education is an act of voilence that needs to be named and challenged because there is no accountablilty or repocutions for politicains that choose to cut funding from education. On a side note something I would propose is making it illegal to cute funding from public education.
As a last comment I have found it interesting that learning about issues I already knew about again through the lens of education has radicalized me even further and brings out deep emotions and strong rhetoric that I have never used before.