Do your Traditional School Grammar, and Like It!
I have been trying throughout my blog to post information and responses in a fairly non-committal manner. I have tried to investigate items without ranting about personal beliefs. I have tried to remain as unbiased as possible.
But after reading “Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire” I couldn’t help but feel a little emotional. John McWhorter argues in The New York Sun that Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, which he says does not change the status quo, is actually harming inner-city schools. I have not read Kozol’s text yet, but I will soon as my capstone class is starting it over break.
Part of this was because so many of them have been taught to resist doing their jobs effectively. It is no big secret that we have known how to teach poor children to read from book-shy homes for 40 years. Back in the 1960s, the federally funded education program, Project Follow Through, showed that the best strategy for reading was rigorous, phonics-based instruction termed Direct Instruction.
I can’t help but feel the arrogance in this opinion. If the best way to teach reading was discovered 40 years ago why do people continue to research this subject? Are whole language or sentence combining strategies completely useless since they were created post-1960? I think it is incredibly narrow-minded to assume a past breakthrough is as good as pedagogy can get in a subject. And what about teachers being taught to resist doing their jobs effectively? McWhorter continues explaining this concept.
Whence the curious notion that anything could be better than a technique that works? There is also a larger problem that has more to do with inner city schools’ failures than funding — schools devoted to inculcating leftist dogma rather than imparting skills…
An especially cherished text is Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a peculiar piece of Marxist rhetoric, complete with a call to render teachers learners and students teachers.
I knew it! The leftist indoctrination of America’s youth is to blame for today’s inner-city public school situation. I cannot subscribe to this theology as a future teacher in good faith. If all I consider myself to be is an ‘imparter of skills’ I will be nothing more than a cog in a machine. I will spit out unquestioning machines who do not question the status quo. The assault on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed actually hit a personal level with me as I am currently reading it.
McWhorter is upset with the concept of teachers becoming learners and students becoming teachers. His opinion on this is completely different than my own. If I cannot learn from my students, if I feel I know everything and no one can teach me, if I lose humility I will no longer be a teacher. I will be a tyrant. Likewise, if my students never feel responsibility for their learning, if my students never learn about their own respective potential, if my students never realize they have knowledge and experience which can be helpful to others they will never be able to be critically involved in society. So much for my unbiased blog, but sometimes you just have to vent.
Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire
Johnathan McWhorter
February 22, 2007
A New Look at School of Choice
Well this article was pretty interesting. It appears the Oakland school district enacted a new way to utilize school of choice. Their system is based on one implemented five years ago in San Francisco. In an article on Reason.com (originally published in Education Week) Lisa Snell and Shikha Dalmia give an interesting take on a new example / way to look at school of choice. Oakland enacted a weighted-student-formula plan.
Under this program, kids are not required to attend their neighborhood school, especially if it is failing. Rather, they can pick any regular public or charter school in their district and take their education dollars with them; more students therefore means more revenues for schools. Furthermore, as the name suggests, the revenues are “weighted” based on the difficulty of educating each student, with low-income and special-needs kids commanding more money than smart, well-to-do ones. Schools have to compete for funding, but the upside is that they have total control over it.
Phew, that is a lot of information. I have to admit I am unfamiliar with exact concepts associated with school of choice, so my analysis may not be complete. But I will do my best.
First, it is school of choice. If a student is in a failing school she would theoretically be able to move into a more successful school within the district. What is interesting is the weighted aspect of the finance. Students with low-income or special-needs are given more money in the budget. This would entice schools, looking for as much money as possible, to make each respective school as attractive to these disadvantaged students as possible. The competition was extreme.
Meanwhile, Oakland hosted a daylong fair last month at which the district’s 120-plus schools could vie with each other to entice parents, handing out information about course offerings, highlighting accomplishments, and answering questions. In short, schools are being forced to sell themselves to each and every parent.
This sounds like schools being run as a business gone wild. The competition in this market is fierce. But if the competition leads towards schools desperately trying to do what’s best for the student, is this necessarily a bad thing? The article paints this system as the next great thing but I feel some reservation. Perhaps it stems from how I naturally shiver a little when I see the words ‘school’ and ‘business’ a little too close together in a concept.
Experimenting with School Choice
Lisa Snell and Shikha Dalmia
February 26, 2007
Socio-economic Integration
Largely minority urban schools, on the whole, score lower on Standardized Tests than their suburban counterparts. Likewise there is a strong correlation between family income level and test scores. With urban schools often catering to more impoverished students, it is not surprising their test scores are lower. If socio-economic status is such a key issue towards determining test scores, how can we improve test scores without improving socio-economic status?
Burlington Schools in Burlington, Vermont have an idea. They want to have the enrollment in their school system based on family income. They want to mix poor students with middle-class students with rich students. This is interesting though I feel it is a tad misguided. An article by Molly Walsh of the Burlington Free Press examines this issue as it applies to her locale as well as the national image.
At least four decades of national education research shows that low-income students generally perform worse on standardized tests than students from families with more money. Lower-income students are also more likely to drop out of school, less likely to be enrolled in honors or advanced placement classes at the high school level, and less likely to go to college.
I can not argue with this statement. It seems basic. Poor families generally have lower education levels than those who are better off. If a family is minimally educated they may not stress the importance of staying in school, enrolling in honors courses, and going to college. This quote from the article seems like common sense. But how are people trying to solve this socio-economic issue? One proposal includes moving students with low family incomes into middle class schools.
“Clearly, the research finds that, on average, low-income students will do better in middle-class schools,” said Richard Kahlenburg, a senior fellow at New York City think tank The Century Foundation and author of “Altogether Now, Creating Middle Class Schools Through Public School Choice.”
Statistics prove students from a lower class background in a middle-class school perform better on tests. But isn’t this missing the point? Moving kids into middle class schools may guarantee better instructor but it does not help these students once they go home. To me this seems like putting a bandaid over a knife wound; the problem is more than skin deep. Moving students does not fix schools which are still in impoverished areas. And what about the students who cannot / will not move? Instead of keeping quality education separate from urban areas we should try to bring quality education into the city. It may, on the surface, help students to attend a different school. But failing schools are still not being fixed, just glossed over.
The Economics of Learning
February 25, 2007
Molly Walsh
