Week 4 Quotes

"In some schools, the principals and teachers tell me that the tests themselves and preparation for the tests control more than a quarter of the year." (Kozol 113)

Kozol went on to describe the afterschool test preparations, weekend test preparation sessions, and other huge time investments in preparing students to test. Having been in schools when testing takes place, I am sad to say I'm not surprised by the sheer amount of time Kozol described as having been dedicated to these tests. I can only speak to the testing in a suburban school system (Meriden has an odd population dynamic, but I'd ultimately say it leans toward a more suburban school as Kozol would define them). Even there, testing takes place over six times in one school year: five iterations of the Meriden District Assessment with the CAPT fit in there as well. This is not counting the prep time and lessons directed toward testing. What testing like this does ultimately is create a very stressful environment for teachers, students, and administration. There's a general unease and tension that is always present, but it builds during actual testing. Ultimately, teachers end up treating testing days as wasted time in terms of lessons. Though students do have regular schedules after testing sessions, they are often too burned out to focus on any serious content, and who can blame them?

"A fundamental aspect of multicultural education is that different students have different ways of knowing and seeing the world." (Spring 118, 14th ed.)

I had to seize on this quote, despite being one of the first sentences of the chapter, because it links so directly to a point I was making last week. Previously, I had mentioned that I thought a more integrated approach to bilingual education would be beneficial. What I failed to elaborate on is the cultural component that is touched upon here by Spring. Anyone who has studied a second language knows that direct translation word-for-word is not always possible. This is because language has a strong cultural component linked to it that reflects how members of that culture see the world. In ESL programs, the focus is too often on learning words. The cultural component and the understanding of ideas is what really matters. As an example, I took German in college and would often answer "Nicht schlect" when asked how I was doing. That translates to "Not bad," a phrase used often by Americans to describe when things are going fine. On a trip to Germany, a woman kindly explained to me that in German it has a negative connotation - in other words, "Not bad, but not good." Good multicultural education would pick up on cultural connotations and get students to understand different cultural viewpoints. I was very pleased to see that Spring went on to touch upon this key component of multicultural education.

"Leaders of the multicultural education movement... are concerned with empowering oppressed people by integrating the history and culture of dominated groups into public school curricula and textbooks." (Spring 125, 14th ed.)

I think it's important to note that empowering other cultures is an excellent tool, but it can easily be implemented the wrong way. It is particularly counterproductive when it becomes clear that the dominant culture (White) is the culture attempting to spearhead the empowerment of other cultures, as it shows a clear lack of understanding. Two cases come to mind. When I grew up, I noticed very early that many American history books, in talking about the Boston Massacre, mention that one of those killed was Crispus Attucks, a black man. The mention ended with that. This point was made in every teaching of the Boston Massacre. I always wondered, aside from being black, what made this man's story important. The books never mentioned why he was singled out, but they pointed him out as if to meet some quota of mentioning African Americans. The second is the general idea of Black History Month. The notion that black history should be particularly emphasized in just one month is absurd. All too often, black history is relegated to this month alone, and the well-intentioned idea behind this month becomes counterproductive. Luckily, empowerment is changing. Assisting in several social studies classes while subbing, I got to experience units involving history of various Asian cultures. In one class, an entire unit focused on just India. By contrast, my own world history schooling always avoided Asia, as there was no time to study it. Things are changing for the better, but in a white dominated society, it still needs to progress a long way.

Week 3 Quotes

"She also spoke with sharp discernment of the race-specific emphasis of the curriculum. 'If we were not a segregated school,' she said, 'if there were middle-class white children here, the parents would rebel at this curriculum and they would stop it cold - like that!'" (Kozol 75)

I tend to disagree with this quote based on personal experience. During middle school, I was always part of the honors level group - those children who were the highest achievers. Not surprisingly, this was a segregated group of almost entirely white students. But when a new teaching technique came along, it was forced upon us the same as it was lower groups. I remember the specific example of M6D - a method of writing a formulaic paragraph that, while constructed properly, was boring as all hell. The students in my group understood the problems with this approach being forced upon us, but still every teacher tried to utilize it. And while my parents didn't like this newest fad from an educational consultant, they never went to board of education meetings or spoke out against it. Kozol's point is that much more of this rigid, rote learning goes on in segregated schools, which I don't doubt. But to say it doesn't occur in non-segregated schools is basically saying that bad teaching doesn't happen in white schools - it does!

"She therefore had developed what she called 'the MultiModal Pumpkin Unit' to teach science (seeds), arithmetic (the size and shape of pumpkins, I believe - this detail wasn't clear), and certain items she had adapted out of language arts, in order to position "pumpkins" in a frame of state proficiencies." (Kozol 80)

Maybe we don't have all the details, but what Kozol describes here is, in my opinion, good teaching! This teacher made connections to the topics using an example. The pumpkin basically provides an excuse to branch off into science, geometry, and cultural studies. I'm not saying everything a teacher brings into the classroom needs to be connected, but a good teacher can find those tangential connections and make them come alive for the students. That this teacher was afraid of it not meeting standards seems to speak to a lack of confidence in her own abilities. Standards can be troublesome, but like them or not teachers need to work with them for the time being. This strikes me as an excellent example of being creative within the framework of state standards and not letting it limit the lessons.

"Completely revising the educational justification for segregation, the judge argued that 'evidence clearly shows that Spanish-speaking children are retarded in learning English by lack of exposure to its use by segregation.'" (Spring 91)

I find this comment from as early as 1946 interesting, as it hints at the later findings that exposure to a language facilitates learning it and that students exposed to two languages fair better than those who speak just one. It's sad, therefore, that much segregation still occurs even within supposedly non-segregated schools. In my hometown, ELL students are often placed in seperate classes for most of the day. Placing ELL students in special classes is not necessarily a problem, but it becomes a problem when the classes are segregated from the larger student population. The point of having them be in schools with English-speaking students should be to immerse them in the language. When their only interactions with English are in passing in the halls, I fail to see the benefit. In addition, ELL programs seem to have the wrong approach in mind. They often focus solely on teaching the students English. The programs should allow ELL students to bring their language into a predominantly English classroom. Language is not merely about words, but ideas. Bringing a second language into a classroom allows students to understand how ideas are conveyed between languages, to understand differences between the cultures that the languages come from, and to therefore actually know the language as opposed to simply knowing words.

Week 2 Quotes

"When I asked a group of fifth grade boys who Thurgood Marshall was and what he did to have a school named after him, most of the boys had no idea at all." (Kozol 23)

This quote seems to speak to a real disconnect between what should be taught and what is actually taught. First of all, I wonder why the students are not taught about Thurgood Marshall. Do teachers simply stick to a bad curriculum year after year that does not cover his contributions? Or is there a more deceptive reasoning behind this - namely that learning about his contributions would highlight the poor conditions of the school - as if they aren't already aware of the inherent unfairness. I don't think the intent of the administrators is sinister in any way, but it may be simply misguided good intentions. Whatever the reasoning, the students are being done a great disservice. Even disregarding race, it strikes me as a very targetted glossing over of history and a very poor educational practice. Even if knowing Thurgood Marshall's contributions would make students aware of the unfair conditions, it is something that should be taught, for the first step to solving any problem is awareness of the problem.

"One of the reasons for these incantations in the schools that serve black and Hispanic children is what is believed to be the children's loss of willingness 'to try,' their failure to believe they have the same abilities as do white children in more privileged communities." (Kozol 35)

I feel that the issue touched upon here is one of the central issues to understanding racial tensions in this country, and a point that many even on the liberal left do not quite understand. I myself have argued with my father over this, who can hold very old-fashioned views. From my experiences in schools, it's true that the non-white students often do not try as hard or can often be troublemakers. But their unwillingness to try should not be blamed on their personal choices. They live within a system that keeps them down, treats them as inferior. That these students are expected to rise above this is absurd. When placed within a harsh system and presented with hardship after hardship, it should come as no surprise that the children lose faith in their own abilities or even develop a bitterness. To act in such a way is basic human nature regardless of race. As a future teacher, I will need to accept that many minority students may enter the classroom already feeling bitter or experiencing a loss of faith in their own abilities. It will be my job to ask myself how I can begin to reverse such a degredation of self-confidence.

"'I don't bear any guilt for knowing how to write a grant,' he said, a statement that undoubtedly made sense to some but skirted the entire issue of endemic underbudgeting of public schools attended by children of poor people who did not enjoy his money-raising skills or possible connections to grant makers." (Kozol 49)

The context in which Kozol placed this makes the PTA leader seem very uncaring of the larger societal issue, and perhaps he is, though I am unable to judge based on one quote. But he touches upon an issue I feel the need to address, namely the issue of guilt. I do not disagree that society favors whites over non-whites, but the solution should not and cannot involve making people feel guilty for whether or not they are privileged. This feeling becomes more apparent reading any of Tim Wise's articles. I do not disagree with anything he says, but I walk away from it feeling guilty simply for being white. And a feeling like that is not, in any sense, constructive. In the case of public school grants, administrators of predominantly white schools should not feel guilty for wanting more funding for their students. After all, they just want what's best for their students, and that cannot in any sense be a bad thing. The guilt, to me at least, should fall on the grant foundations and policy makers who should be able to look at the history of grants they write and see a clear disregard for funding segregated schools. But the blame for this cannot be placed squarely on the parents and administrators, be ause they have little influence on the larger system.