Argument and Quotes
This author argues that tracking students by ability only benefits gifted and " higher students" but is damaging to students performing in the middle and lower areas in school. When students are stereotyped as being " less able" she says, they have fewer opportunities to learn. The students in the higher groups are exposed to more critical thinking and problem solving skills, the author argues. These are skills that need to be developed in all groups I believe, and are more important than memorization of random facts. One thing in the article that really stuck out for me was how she said that teachers of low ability classes are more likely to use ridicule and strong criticism than high ability teachers. This really bothers me, if this is true. It does in my opinion make for self fulfilling prophecies. The author says that " without a positive classroom climate students spend considerable energy interfering with the teachers agenda, and teachers must spend more of their time and energy just trying to maintain control." Given this it seems that creating this positive classroom environment would be beneficial to teachers as well as students. A very significant quote in this article was " It seems that tracking is both a response to significant differences among students and an ongoing contribution to those differences." I agree with this, tracking just accentuates the differences in students and does nothing to help them in my opinion. Another quote from the article is that " Unless teachers and administrators believe and expect all students to learn well, they will be unlikely to create school and classroom conditions where students believe in their own ability and exert the effort it takes to succeed."
In discussing alternatives to tracking the author explains the importance of a curriculum that is rich in content and related to real life. Active learning tasks are better than passive ones. Real world problems should be used which are no doubt more relate-able to all students than something they cannot imagine. All students benefit, I think , from working with students of varying levels. I have worked in a special education preschool classroom for many years and I have seen this work there. The special education students are mixed with typically developing peers for all activities. The peers learn important skills like patience and tolerance as well as the important lesson that there are many differences in people and they should be celebrated. The children with disabilities learn a great deal from the peers and everyone is part of the group, no one is better just different. If these programs work so well at the preschool level, I can not imagine why they would not work with older students.
Another important point that is mentioned in the article is in regard to poor and minority students. These students are placed in low-ability groups much more often. Below is the link to an interesting article about schools in Seattle that made an effort to dismantle tracking in their schools and some of the results. They did this in an effort to reduce the racial achievement gaps there.
https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/an-effort-to-raise-achievement-by-dismantling-de-facto-segregation/
The Question that I would want to talk about is how teachers can change the grouping by ability and differentiate instruction ? It seems like a huge challenge to me for them to have the time and resources to do this even if they really want to.
Argument
I decided to summarize the arguments from the two articles and the website, and then connect them all together at the end of the post.
The Problem We All Live With:
I found this radio podcast to be very interesting. I listened to it several times. Nikole Hannah Jones is speaking about the achievement gap between black and white students and integration. Her argument is that with all of the different things that schools try to close this gap, there is one thing that they don't try that is proven to work. That thing is old fashioned integration like what happened after Brown vs. The Board of Education. She says that it works because it gets black kids in the same classes with white kids which gives them quality teachers and quality instruction. This part surprised me. I know that there are some bad teachers out there, but I was very surprised at the idea that there would be so many. My opinion is why would people teach, if they don't care about it and are going to do a bad job? I mean it isn't like a high paying, easy, or low stress job, I don't think. I think most teachers want to educate kids and love kids or why would they be doing it? That's just my personal opinion though. Not only does she say that segregated schools have the least qualified teachers, She also says the students have more stress and greater educational needs due to the high concentration of poverty. This I can imagine is very true. The stresses of poverty and all that goes with it must make learning much more of a challenge.
Nikole talks about a situation that happened five or six years ago which forced the issue of integration in the Normandy school district in Missouri. The school district had horrible scores, and had been on probation for 15 years. She interviews a mother and daughter, who were desperate to get out of the school district. Then the Normandy School District lost its accreditation completely. This made a state law called a transfer law go into affect. The law was not a desegregation law but it did say that the district had to pay to send the students to an accredited school if they wanted to go to one.
They chose a school called Francis Howell which was very far away and had mostly white students. The parents at Francis Howell were not happy with the decision and said horrible things at the town meeting. This didn't surprise me that much. They made sure to say that it wasn't a race issue but they were concerned about the test scores going down and violent students coming into the school. They didn't want those people coming over to their school. The student being interviewed for this radio show was successful in the new school but then they changed the accreditation of Normandy and said all the kids had to go back. Normandy became non accredited instead of unaccredited which is really just as bad, but the transfer law no longer applied anymore. Some of the parents filed lawsuits because they wanted to stay at the better schools. The judge sided with the parents and said " every day that a child attends an unaccredited school, the child could suffer harm that could not be repaired." The argument of this radio show, is that when integration was forced, it was working. Below I attached a link to a very interesting article about The Normandy School District in January of 2018, and what the parents thought about it.
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/parents-still-wary-normandy-schools-despite-upgrade-academic-standing#stream/0
Brown vs Board of Education :
This website is an overview of Brown vs. The Board of Education. In May of 1954 the court declared segregation by race illegal. It made equal opportunities in education the law. A quote from the website says " Today thanks in part to the victorious struggle in the Brown case, most Americans believe that a racially integrated, ethnically diverse society and educational system is a worthy goal, though they may disagree deeply about how to achieve it." This really stood out to me as the problem which is explained so well in The Problem We All Live With. While most people feel this way, when it comes down to integrating schools or other things that effect them directly they don't want to do it. In my opinion, in order for equality in education to exist people have to make changes on the personal level. This seems to be where we are falling short.
Separate and Unequal:
Author Bob Herbert has this very same argument in his New York Times article about integration.He says " One of the most powerful tools for improving the educational achievement of poor black and Hispanic public school students is, regrettably, seldom even considered." He is talking about integration. He writes that there is a great deal of evidence to show that poor kids of all ethnic backgrounds do better academically when they attend school with peers who have more wealth in their families. He argues that even though schools are not legally segregated, they still are segregated today.
My question is, if school desegregation is proven to work how do we get the people in the affluent communities to get on board with it? What kind of incentives could there be, to make it more attractive? How would we as a society erase or minimize their fears so they would try it. I think although the parents in The Problem We All Live With are wrong it is because they are afraid. How would we counter that?
In this article the authors argue that while the importance and value of service learning cannot be disputed, there needs to be more discussion about the goals and types of service learning. This article poses four questions that need to asked in regards to service learning.
(1) "What values do service learning and curricula models seek to promote?'
(2) "What kinds of social and political relations do they ask students to imagine?"
(3) "What kinds of relationships develop between students and those they serve?"
(4) "What kind of society does service learning lead students to work toward?"
The authors argue that there is a difference between service learning that focuses on charity as opposed to service learning that focuses on change. The difference is that charity focused service learning helps people by emphasizing giving and change focused service learning focuses on caring. I agree with the authors that while there is a difference the two can definitely be intertwined. I thought of the example of making Thanksgiving pies for people in need which I do every year. It makes me feel good, and I am sure that the people enjoy the pies but it does not really connect me to the people or inspire any change to their circumstances. So while they both have value I can see where service learning that inspires real change has more lasting value. The authors say that " Those oriented towards change embrace the importance of political activity." and also that " Service activities should develop students ability at critical thinking." I agree with this. Helping is good but learning how to think critically can create the changes needed to solve some of the problems in society. The authors say that " to be critical thinkers students must be able to consider arguments that conflict with their own ideas and self interest." If the service project helps people directly through charity that is good too, but real change I think should be the objective of service learning. In the link below, Soledad O' Brien of CNN talks to a group of University students about creating change and the importance of critical thinking, She says," We can't shut out those we disagree with-that is not being a leader, that is being an obstacle." https://csl.uchicago.edu/feature/creating-change-your-community
The question I would like to ask is: What kinds of service learning do you think would inspire students to learn and employ critical thinking. What kind of service learning creates real change?
