Kozol Chapter 7 and Spring Chapters 1 and 6

Kozol Page 161

“The assignment I gave them was to describe for me in writing what they saw in front of them each day when they came into school, what they liked, what they did not like in the class, or in the school, and how they felt in general about the situation in which they and I now found ourselves.”

Kozol gave this assignment to his fourth grade class that he taught in Boston. Instead of listening to what the test scores said about his school or what the government/ administrators said about it, he decided to ask the children who live in it every day.  The officials have no idea what is truly going on inside the walls of a building because they don’t go there and they don’t ask the children about it.  The test scores only tell the administrators how well the children in the school can take a test, but they don’t tell the reasons behind the children getting the scores they got (good and bad.) Kozol expresses the importance of the way the children feel while in their learning environment.  The responses he got included one child saying the rooms and windows were dirty, another talked about new having a new teacher almost every day and another talked about seeing pigeons flying in the halls.  The students did express that they saw flowers in school sometimes that they liked.  However, the bad things (in this Boston school) far outweigh the good things.  Standardized testing scores won’t tell about these conditions in a school.  The children will come out and tell anyone, if they ask, what going to school is like for them.  If feeling comfortable, safe and relaxed and school is so important, why don’t more administrators come in and ask the children how they feel about their educational setting?  Has the voice of the child become collectedly drowned out by the booming voice of the standardized tests?

Kozol Page 183

“”Why is it,” she asked, “that students who do not need what we need get so much more? And we who need it so much more get so much less?””

Here is a question that Kozol has been trying to answer for 40 years.  There may be no answer to this question, but are there things that could be causing it to be true?  Why, if everyone is supposed to be equal, are our schools not?  The high school students in this part of the chapter talk about seeing rats in their classrooms, feeling humiliated because they need to go to the bathroom during the school day but aren’t allowed to, having to take sewing/hairdressing because the college prep classes aren’t open and not being able to do some of their homework because the library is closed a lot.  The teachers say there is just not enough room in the school for all of the students so they work on a revolving schedule that allows for shifts of students to be in the school at different times.  This year-round schooling is not common in any of the other school districts in that area, but it is used at this high school because of the size of the classes that are attending.  Why hasn’t anyone thought of re-districting or making more schools to accommodate all of the children?  If someone has thought of it, why hasn’t anything been done?

Spring page 4

“… “education” does not always benefit the individual or society.  Public and personal benefits depend on the content of instruction. To think critically about education means to think critically about the content of instruction and the potential effect of that content on society.”

Seeing this concept written in words has a harder impact on me than it did when I just “thought” about it as being true.  In the timeline that Spring gives on page 5, we see that education over the years has changed to benefit out government and how our government wants our children and our people to act and think.  For example, from 1880’s to the 1920’s, our education system had goals that including Americanizing immigrants, reforming urban areas, training labor force for industrialization, etc.  Over time those goals have changed up until the last 20-30 years or so when the goals have been community service, preparing for a global economy and controlled learning through standardized tests.  Our country has always been very focused on staying economically advance in the world, and so the government’s goals in education for children is to make sure those children are ready for our labor markets and for the changes in society that our government and the world are bringing about.  These ways of teaching are not meant to help the individual person succeed in daily life, but instead help the country succeed as a whole.  The only stuff that may benefit the children directly is the content being taught in the classroom each day.  However, the content does not promise to do this.  The teachers are taught to make sure that the way they are teaching a concept will help the concept to reach each individual child.  To me, these goals behind teaching are seen as a sort of manipulation of the American people.  In a small way, we are robots who are subject to learning what our government wants us to hear.  When looking at it honestly however, is there any other way for our government to teach its citizens?  Can our government actually teach things that will be beneficial to the individual instead of the country, or would it possibly cause division amongst the people?  These questions may never be answered, but it still makes me curious to think about them.

Spring page 12

“To stop crime, Mann reasoned, schools must instill moral values in students.”

The biggest problem with this concept, as Spring points out, is which morals do the schools want to use to teach all of their students.  Issues with religion and education come up when talking about this topic.  Do schools teach morals that are taught by the Catholic religion, or by the Jewish religion, or by the Buddhist religion, etc.?  Because schools do not want to enter into the debate on the mixing of religion and schools, they have come up with a very common and basic system of principals that basically tells the students to be good people, to be clean, be proper, etc.  Edward Ross, in the early 1890’s,  saw this as the government finding another way to control its people: social control.  He explains that the school is replacing family and religion in instilling moral values in people.  He sees it as another way for the government to find a way into people’s lives and control in whatever ways they can.  Is this still belief still considered to be true today?  The United States is not a communist country, but is there a lot of government control that we are not fully aware of as participating citizens in the country?  Also, is it too much to expect children to learn the morals of the school system when they may have different morals that they have been taught at home or in their own religion?

Spring page 158

“Transfers must be allowed for two reasons: 1) when a school is determined to be “persistently dangerous” and 2) when a student becomes the victim of a violent crime at school.”

According to this, when either of these two things happen, parents are able to send their child to a new school in the same district and this school must have a higher academic performance than the school they were originally attending. However, when transferring to a school with higher academic performance, the students must also meet the requirements that are given by the new school in terms of entrance requirements.  Hearing this makes me ask a few questions as to how well this law may actually work out.  First, what happens if the child tries to transfer to a better school than their current one (due to the reasons above), but can’t meet any of the entrance requirements at any other school?  By law, that child is not allowed to go to a school that has lower or equal academic progress compared to the one they are currently in, so they must go to a better one.  If the child can’t meet those expectations, are they forced to stay in the same school that they are trying to get out of or does the law have any loopholes when it comes to this?  Could any of the schools make any exceptions if what is stated above ends up happening?

Spring page 170

“Parents can dodge the control of an unrepresentative school board and school bureaucracy by educating their children at home; however, most states do regulate home schooling to some extent.”

I read this statement and one question automatically comes to my mind: does the government control almost everything that is happening in our country today, even things in our homes?  It is a scary thought knowing that even the parents don’t have total control in their own homes.  I am not saying that I disagree with the government having a little bit of control in the home-schooling situation, what I am saying is that it’s a scary thought knowing that the government is involved everywhere we look.  I do believe though, that it is a good idea for parents who choose homeschooling to have regulations and goals that their children need to meet over a given time period.  If these goals were not set, then who would know what was going on with the children that are being home schooled.  Not all parents can do it, despite them trying to.  Not all parents have the skills to act as a child’s teacher.  Should all parents who want to home school be forced to get a teaching degree?  Or are the regulations that the government has set up enough?