Kozol Page 137
“As a result, says Pollitt, these programs and these schools end up as “disproportionately white enclave” often sited in a larger school that is “almost entirely minority and largely poor” – “oases of comparative privilege,” as she describes them, “in a desert of deprivation.””
In order to get their children into the nicer and more expensive schools in New York, parents are forced to pay large sums of money. Here is what causes the large difference in the number of black and white children that go to these higher-end schools. Parents who have a higher income can afford them, while the parents who have a low income can’t. In order for a better chance to get into these schools, parents hire private tutors, IQ tests, and other outside help. Parents who can do this provide a better chance for their children to get into these schools. A lower-income family does not have the money for all of these extra things, so their child does not end up being able to go to the school. Privilege comes into play here. In New York, like the rest of the U.S., white people have more privilege than people in any other race. White people have a higher chance of getting hired somewhere and of making more money than others. These privileges that are not earned but rather given to people through societal norms. This fact of an unfair skew of white people being admitted into a higher-end school over black children reminds me of a topic that Spring talks about. The government wants to believe that all children start out equal in their schools because they are all given the same opportunities to learn and gain knowledge. However, if a child is forced to go to a run-down elementary school because their parents can’t afford a better one, there is not an equal educational experience taking place. How can we make it so that it is not such a big competition to get children into specific schools? It is a lose-lose situation for people who have low-incomes. Can the government or society change so that segregation in the school systems will diminish?
Kozol Page 140
“… there is an underlying sense at the same time, at least among the parents of the children who prevail within this competition, that the students who get into these schools like Stuyvesant must genuinely deserve to be there; it is also commonly believed that most of the kids who don’t get in could probably not handle the demands they would be facing if they did.”
What is it that makes parents, and students, feel this way? The fact that twenty six years ago, the percentage of black students in the upper-class school Stuyvesant was 13 percent and today is down to 2.7 percent causes me to question today’s society. Why is it that the diversity in a school has gotten to be so much less when “equality” is supposed to be a part of our everyday lives? This makes me think of white supremacy in the United States. When people live this life every day, many don’t know anything else that would make them question it. How is it that a parent, in the United States, can think that their child is not good enough to go to a school? Aren’t we supposed to be the country that stands for freedom? There is no freedom in this situation. Although racism is not the same as it was fifty years ago, things like this prove that it definitely still exists. Every person is good enough to get the best education they can, not only white people. Roughly fifteen percent of students in that school are from a low-income family, but the racial make-up is still highly segregated. Parents who are not aware that opportunities are out there for their children, or who have been told to believe that their children just “can’t do it”, are suppressed citizens of the U.S.
Marlowe page 64
“This bureaucratic culture fosters the pervasive assumption that when students misbehave or achieve poorly, they must be “fixed” because the problem inheres in the students or their families, not in the social ecology of the school, grade or classroom.”
When a child is having difficulties in school, looking only at the child and their actions is taking a naïve outlook on the issue taking place. There is a background and interconnected web of things that make up who that child is. If you try and blame a child alone for something, that issue will never be resolved because the reason behind the child’s actions were never addressed and resolved. People are very intricate beings that are made up of family, society, culture, etc. Every child that walks into a school is extremely diverse and brings with them a plethora of experiences that are different from every other person. These experiences form the child into who they are and r the reason behind who they have become. When dealing with problems in the school setting (the book gives the example of adolescent obesity), why is it that teachers quickly blame the child and child alone for them? Is it easier to take problems and try and solve them at face value than it is to try and get to the deeper cause behind it?
Marlowe page 163
“A critical thread in this ecological web is utilization of the wealth of diversity and of the cultural and personal resources that students and their families bring to urban schools.”
Having such diversity come into a classroom provides for a whole new world of learning and teaching for both the students and teacher. Children can bring knowledge to the classroom that the teacher may not even know exists just based on their experiences. The HiPass Schools that Marlowe talks about seem to be doing a great job focusing on the children above everything else and putting their experiences and lifestyles above everything else. Marlowe explains that these schools are run by teachers who are in the buildings everyday and know what school-life is all about, not administrators or the government. I feel like systems like this are best for schools because rules are being made by the people who are in their everyday, not by people who sit in a legislative building trying to make guesses on what is best for the students that they have never met before. Mary Cowhey, author of the book “Black Ants and Buddhists” also stresses the importance of children’s cultures and backgrounds in the learning environment of the classroom. Many of her lessons are built off of what the children respond with while she is giving a lesson. These bits of knowledge and experience given by the students, in her own experience, have helped the children to learn above and beyond anything that she could have taught them herself. If there are solid examples of this type of learning/teaching working above and beyond anything else in the classroom, why haven’t more schools turned toward focusing more on this than tests? Why hasn’t our government listened and stopped the big push on standardized testing that has caused many of our nations students to learn even less than they had before the testing began?
Spring page 31
“Ideally the equality of opportunity through education would ensure that citizens occupied their particular social positions because of merit and not because of family wealth, heredity or special cultural advantages.”
According to the Common School model equality is set within schools, but once they go home, students become unequal. Children’s backgrounds and at-home lives provide as a main basis for inequality because in the poorer neighborhoods, children don’t have the resources or support system that the richer children do. In poorer neighborhoods, parents are working more to try and make money to pay for everything so they are not home to help the children with school work. Many times in a low-income family, the parents do not have a lot of school background to help their children when they need it. The higher income societies usually include parents that went to school and are home a lot more because they have the money and resources to do so. The children have a much more stable, productive and supportive lifestyle.
The Sorting Machine Model states that education itself is not equal because students are broken into groups of perceived learning ability. Some students graduate with honors while others graduate knowing how to sew. They sort students into future positions of the job market. Lower income students deal with this while the higher income students are prepped for going to college. There are intelligence tests that teachers have the students take that tells them what kind of occupation people should go into. The people believe it is stands for equality because all children are taking the same test.
Both of these examples show that unfortunately, in a school setting, children who come from a wealthier background have more of a chance to succeed in their lives. There are more opportunities presented to them and have more support. Can our country ever truly set up an “equal education system” for all? What issues in today’s society would need to be addressed in order for our country to really have each person start off equal in our education systems? Could our social positions ever be based off of merit and not off of wealth or cultural advantages?
Spring page 48
“Therefore, if parents were planning to prepare their child to enter kindergarten with high reading and math scores they would read to their child, own a computer, take their child to performing arts events, and send their children to preschool. In addition, they should have high expectations for their child’s education…”
What happens when parents can’t do all of those things? If a parent doesn’t have a lot of educational experience, they don’t know what kind of expectations they should have for their children because they have never witnessed it in their own lives. If parents are too focused on having money to pay for everything, they can’t be as involved in their child’s education. So does that mean most children are not prepared enough to enter kindergarten? If so, is even the earliest part of education fair in any way? Children aren’t getting a fair and equal education because they aren’t starting off fair. Test scores are extremely important in schools today, and socio-economic status directly correlates to scores on tests. Without the support or resources at home, students can’t prepare for the high standardized tests that students with a lot of support and all of the resources they need are able to prepare for. So what happens to the children that are not “prepared” for kindergarten? Privileges affect everyone, and this is a big example of where privilege is affecting everyone. Can privileges amongst people ever be evened out so that everyone is equal? If children aren’t equal as they start school (or even before school), can they ever receive the same opportunities that people of privilege are given, at any point of their life? Or are they constantly going to have to try and play “catch-up” all of their lives?
Kara,
ReplyDeleteResponding to your first quote and question, I don't know if society can stop competing to get into those schools. Parents always want the best for their children, so they will do whatever it takes to get them the best education even if they need to spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars just to go through elementary school alone. It sounds silly, but that’s how it is and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Parents also want their children to be safe, so they feel the need to bring them into these more “sophisticated” schools to keep them safe and become well-educated. I personally don’t understand how some of these schools cost so much money and why they even need to charge parents and have interviews, etc. This allows the schools to basically make or break a student’s future, at least in the parent’s eyes.
Katrina,
ReplyDeleteSpring actually talks about how in an equally educted society, all children would receive the same education when they started off school. Education actually sets up where in life that child will end up being in the social and economic aspect. When there are children who start of in expensive private schools, and others who start off in urban low-income schools, they are already starting off unequal. This actually does make or break the child's future because they are starting off with lesser of an opportunity that the children who go to the private schools. Spring page 31
“Ideally the equality of opportunity through education would ensure that citizens occupied their particular social positions because of merit and not because of family wealth, heredity or special cultural advantages.” Unfortunately, our situation in the Unites States is not ideal and it is the racism of today's society that are determining the educational opportunity of students.
Kara,
ReplyDeleteIt’s kind of ironic how you say it’s the racism of today’s society determining this, yet if you were to take a poll about racism, a majority of the Caucasian population will say there are no racism problems today like with that video we watched a couple weeks ago. Do you think we should just simply do away with all private schools and only have public schools? All students would then be in a public school, yet, that still wouldn’t create equality because the majority of suburban schools are better than the urban schools. It’s a hard thing to try to fix and definitely not something that’s going to happen overnight, but do you think the government is even trying to do anything about this or if they even care?
Katrina,
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately the reason white people wouldn't see it as racism is because of the privileges that white people have over any other race in this country. We have talked alot about that in class, and saw it, like you said, in that video we saw in class. I don't know if we should do away with all private schools, because Sppring, in chapter 6, talks about how religious schools are private because they don't like the morals that public schools are teaching the children. I think that there can still be schools like these religious ones set up, but they shouldn't cost any money togo to (or any more than a public school) so that everyone has an equal opportunity to go. However, if we have schools like these still set up do you think that the education of students would still be considered unequal because they aren't learning the same things? This would stop the inequality due to wealth, but it wouldn't necessarily allow education to be equal, which would then end up affecting the future's of the children as well.