The article “Yes we can” had a much more positive tone than the previous article “Unemployment Training”. Instead of highlighting a number of negative aspects of the public school system it offers the idea that we can make a difference in the school system and these student’s lives. There are still some frightening statistics given, “And by the time Latino and African American students hit the age of 17, they have been taught to the same level as 13-year-old White students”. I noticed that it does not say how they score at that level but they are taught at that level.
Given the education gap between students of different race I was actually surprised to see that generally African American students enter kindergarten with slightly better reading skills than their peers. How do these students fall behind by the third grade? is the big question. What is happening to hold these students back? It is clear that some districts are more successful at teaching minority students like
“When we teach children of color to high levels, they can and do achieve at high levels”. This shows that students generally live up to our expectations. If we have low expectations for a group of students they will likely achieve only what we expect of them but if we set the bar high for them they tend to rise up to the challenge. This is something every teacher must do with all of their students. I can expect the world from my students but if their other teachers don’t follow this method the students will have low expectations for themselves academically. This article does pose a realistic method to improve the status of the education gap. There are more methods to help this situation other than having higher expectations. The success in the NY school is likely do to the personal motivation the faculty puts on the students. “We push our kids to excel in all their classes. If I hear that a student is arriving at gym unprepared, or isn’t doing well in art, I’ll ask him about that” (Alicia Calabrese). Here you can see why students would be more motivated to go beyond high school and graduate from college.
1 comment:
I agree with a lot of what Greg has mentioned and also wondered about some similar questions. The main question that i was considering was how the students fell behind: is it due to their home communities? their social interactions? their school communities? I would like to see some further data that helps reinforce this point in particular. This same point can be said for the first statement indicating that by the time Latino and African American students hit the age of 17, they have been taught to the same level as 13-year-old White students. Could this be due to their social interactions or maybe their lives outside of school? It is not uncommon for many of these students to have full time jobs to help support their family so this may lead to their lack of learning. There are many questions that arise from your blog and i fully agree with you and as such would like to see more data to further increase our understanding or what is really going on.
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