This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Apr 2009, by Christy Tucker.
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14 Sep 09
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your upper-class, high-achieving
parents who feel that education is competitive, that there shouldn't be
anyone else in the same class as my child, and we shouldn't spend a whole
lot of time with the have-nots -
I thought if it was good for kids, everyone would embrace it,
and I thought all adults wanted all kids to be successful. That's not
true. The people who receive status from their kids' performing well in
school didn't like that other kids' performance might be raised to the
level of their own kids'. - 37 more annotations...
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Take a step back, however, and you begin to grasp the import of what is
happening from Amherst, Massachusetts, where highly educated white parents
have fought to preserve a tracking system that keeps virtually every child
of color out of advanced classes, -
The parents who prefer
worksheets and lectures can use their clout to reverse or forestall a move
to more learner-centered classrooms -
Pitched battles are more common in integrated schools,
but even here they happen rarely because, in large measure, the affluent
white parents have already won. -
American education is so segregated and stratified today that the elite
mingle mostly with one another. -
racking, advanced placement (AP) courses,
and gifted programs do not provide differential instruction for legitimate
pedagogical reasons -- or allow for a system based on merit -- so much as
they represent a naked grab for artificially scarce benefits by those who
have the power to get them -
To begin with, AP classes at the high school
level are usually difficult but often poorly taught, with an emphasis on
short-term memorization of facts presented in lectures and textbooks -- in
effect, one long test-prep session -
the
beneficiaries of these educational advantages would "be more concerned
about the labels placed on their children than about what actually goes on
in the classroom. -
Granted, it is hard to deny the superiority of the
instruction in gifted-and-talented programs and some other honors or
high-track classes, what with hands-on learning, student-designed
projects, computers, field trips, and other enrichments. But research
generally shows that it is precisely those enrichments that produce better
results rather than the fact that they are accorded only to a select few. -
The detracking in these 10 schools was carefully planned to bring other
students up to a high level, but not to take anything away from the
privileged children. Yet the reaction from the parents of the latter
students has been powerfully negative -- often fatal for the reform
efforts. These parents have pressured educators "to maintain separate and
unequal classes for their children, . . . [demanding] to know what their
children will 'get' that other students will not have access to. -
inclusive schooling offers all students the type of
education usually reserved for gifted and talented students. -
This is essentially what happened in San Diego, where
an attempt to give a leg up to lower-tracked students was, as Elizabeth
Cohen of Stanford University puts it, "the kind of project that you'd
think wouldn't bother upper-status parents at all. Wrong! They said, 'What
are you going to do special for my kid? -
they are in effect sacrificing other children to their own
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The psychology of those parents is that it's not
enough for their kids to win: others must lose -- and they must lose
conspicuously. -
These arguments
will only persuade someone who is looking for more information about his
or her child's improvement or someone who is concerned about sustaining
the child's interest. If, however, the point is not for assessment to be
authentic but for it to serve as a sorting device, to show not how well
the student is doing but how much better he or she is doing than others,
then A's will always be necessary -- and it will always be necessary for
some people's children not to get them -
In a new book titled
How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning, David Labaree of
Michigan State University argues that schooling these days is not seen as
a way to create democratic citizens or even capable workers, but serves
more as a credentialing mechanism. -
The point is not to get an
education but to get ahead -
It is through this lens that we might regard the
demand in some affluent communities for a transmission-based, "bunch
o'facts" curriculum -
if "young people who have
traditionally monopolized 'success' in the classroom are likely to find
themselves joined in success by more of their peers," this can be
"profoundly upsetting to some of their parents whose ambitions for their
children include being at the top of the class in school and getting into
elite colleges. -
Of course, reasonable people can disagree about the
best way to teach math and other subjects, but more than one observer of
the "math wars" has wondered whether we are witnessing a debate over
pedagogy or about something else entirely. -
Or
does parental opposition really just reflect the fear that more
sophisticated math instruction might be less useful for boosting SAT
scores and therefore for getting students into the most elite colleges?
Math reformers who counterpose merely doing arithmetic with really
understanding (and being able to apply) mathematical principles may be
missing the more pertinent contrast, which is between doing what is best
for learning and doing what is best for getting my child into the Ivy
League -
Before long, the children internalize this quest and
come to see their childhood as one long period of getting ready -
What they don't know, for their parents
surely will not tell them, is that this straining toward the future, this
poisonous assumption that the value of everything is solely a function of
its contribution to something that might come later, will continue right
through college, right through professional school, right through the
early stages of a career, until at last they wake up in a tastefully
appointed bedroom to discover that their lives are mostly gone -
moral, social,
artistic, emotional, and other forms of development are often jettisoned
in favor of a narrow academic agenda. -
What Garrison Keillor said about school choice
proposals could easily be applied to ability grouping and gifted programs:
they seem to make sense "until you stop and think about the old idea of
the public school, a place where you went to find out who inhabits this
society other than people like you. -
In some places,
there is legitimate reason for concern, but as a rule too much attention
is paid to the difficulty level of what is being taught, the simplistic
assumption being that harder is better -
To judge what goes on in a
classroom on the basis of how difficult the tasks are is rather like
judging an opera on the basis of how many notes it contains that are
challenging for the singers to hit -
The truth is that, if tests or homework assignments
consist of factual recall questions, it doesn't make all that much
difference whether there are 25 tough questions or 10 easy ones -
"Parents say,
'Look I live in this $600,000 house. I was successful with the system you
currently have. Why do we have to look at anything different?' " The twin
premises of this argument, of course, are equally ripe for challenge: that
the most important kind of success in life can be measured in terms of
real estate and that their own success occurred because of a system
that includes letter grades, separate tracks, memorizing the
multiplication table in third grade, and so on -
the elite students
are getting a school-within-a-school with small classes and plenty of
attention, so "why should you be for change when your kids are benefiting
from exactly what we say is wrong with high schools? -
The answer is that the system is quite clearly broken
for most students -- those who are not among the elect -
f students can read but
don't, if they fail to think deeply or to take satisfaction from playing
with ideas, if they are primarily concerned with what is going to be on
the test, then something is drastically wrong with the status quo -
They couch
their opposition to detracking mainly in terms of the low-track students'
"behavior" -- lack of motivation to learn, lack of commitment to school or
interest in higher education, tendency to act out, and so forth --
without making the connection between these behaviors and the low-track
students' "penetration" of an unequal and hierarchical system in which
they are at the bottom -
ringing those lower-achieving students into
the classroom is going to water down things for my children. They're not
going to be able to keep up, and the teachers are going to have to slow
things down. -
We need to invite people
to live up to their own best ideals, to impress upon them the moral
implications of these policies, and to help them understand that it's not
just other children but the very prospects for a democratic society that
are at risk from tracking and other practices -
The reformer's job, then, is to help parents see that
favored educational practices -- from drill-and-skill teaching techniques
to letter grades to awards assemblies -- are actively impeding the
realization of the very goals that they themselves say they
want -
Likewise, some parents will be relieved that
detracking doesn't mean "teaching to the middle" -- but they have to be
made aware of this -
We're not in the business of educating one group of
students. As professionals we're responsible for educating everyone, and
there are things that we must not do. That's a moral and professional
issue.
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09 Sep 09
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Ruth Radneyparents who want their kids to do well, but NOT all kids to do well.
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10 Apr 09
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McClaren, who looks back on what happened from his new
post several states away, says he made "two fatal assumptions" when he
started: "I thought if it was good for kids, everyone would embrace it,
and I thought all adults wanted all kids to be successful. That's not
true. The people who receive status from their kids' performing well in
school didn't like that other kids' performance might be raised to the
level of their own kids'."
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