Should We Be Worried?

Here is an alarmingly eye-catching portion of an education article:

De facto segregation is alive and well in public schools in virtually every state, but is more common in charter schools – an educational option increasingly endorsed in state and national reform efforts, according to a national study released Thursday.

The trend is particularly severe for African American students, the UCLA researchers found.

Nearly 3 out of 4 black students who attend charters are in “intensely segregated” schools with student populations that are at least 90 percent minority, according to the study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project. That’s twice the rate of regular public schools.

Almost a third of those black students are in what the researchers called “apartheid schools,” where 0 to 1 percent of their classmates are white. Charter schools in the Bay Area and California have similar rates of racial isolation.

These are “the very kind of schools that decades of civil rights struggles fought to abolish in the South,” researchers said.

How do we react to this?

Should AP Stand for Appropriate Placement?

Year after year Newsweek publishes its list of the “best” high schools in America (like this one), and newspapers around the nation rush to print and comment on the standings (like this one). Essentially, the rankings are based on how many AP exams (Advanced Placement exams) are taken when measured against how many students are in a particular school.

Superintendents and principals then desire to be on the list and try to encourage as many students as possible to take the classes and hopefully pass the exams. I absolutely love open enrollment for students, and this includes AP courses.

However, pushing kids to take classes beyond their abilities is irresponsible in my view.

I teach a junior-year College in the High School class which is a lead-in to our AP English course, and we have open enrollment. This, to me, is a fantastic policy. There is a mountain of research detailing how students who take AP courses are much more successful at universities, and allowing students to choose this pathway is an excellent policy.

Still, the students need to understand the level of production required, the amount of homework needed to be successful, and the speed at which these courses move. Too many students are allowed to enter these classes who do not have the skills needed to be successful. They are not referred to the instructors and are not counseled towards a proper placement. If a student acknowledges what is expected of him/her, then the student should enroll; otherwise, a better choice should be presented to the student.

This year I had three students drop my first period class at the semester because they did not know how much of a step up they would be taking. All semester long these students struggled to keep up, and the real problem was that their reading and writing levels were very low for the course; their abilities would have been low for the mainstream (“regular”) class.

In our attempts to gain kudos, to be seen as a top school, and to prepare kids for collegiate coursework, we have to be careful not to place students in positions where they won’t succeed. We can’t set students up for failure.

I guess another post could dedicated to this question: should we be preparing every student for college? Is this appropriate or realistic?

The Great Debate

Over at the Seattle Times a blog post from Ed Cetera has sparked some conversation around the water cooler in our English Department. In the posting Ed Cetera wonders why people love J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and then he mentions his love for Twain’s Huck Finn over Salinger’s Holden Caulfield.

I believe it’s a difficult comparison to make since the two novels are so vastly different. While Huck journeys south, Twain uses Huck’s experiences to comment on the inhumane treatment of humans, the need for human equality, and the importance of education. However, Salinger seems to want a young protagonist to point out how superficial and “phony” society has become. Holden searches for something real while Huck searches for a reason to remain in society; still, both seem to be looking for their places in the world.

Feel free to weigh in on here or on the comments section of the Seattle Times blog post. Either way, I’m curious to hear what you have to say.

Ignorance At Work

If you teach The Chosen or Night or something like it, then you might want to check out how tefillin caused an airliner to land. Of course, the real story is ignorance and those who wield it.

My students thought these people on the plane were ridiculous.

South Carolina and Its Modest Proposal

Swift’s ingeniously written (and ironic) essay “A Modest Proposal” has no business being in the same sentence as South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer. However, if you haven’t read Swift’s satirical work recently, it begins with this:

A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick.

Swift then proceeds to suggest, among other things, that dining on the growing poverty-stricken population is a potential solution. I couldn’t help but think of it after hearing Bauer’s comments about the poor in his state, except that he reminded me of the student who is horrified while reading Swift’s essay because he missed the author’s use of irony. But Bauer’s comments are no laughing matter. Here is part of the controversial statement he provided the other day:

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

After looking at the rest of his remarks, I see what he was trying to say, but his emphasis on the words, “Because they breed” was a bit chilling. His remarks do seem to suggest that the poor are similar, in some way, to animals and that cutting off their access to food is a possible solution. Even if some believe Bauer’s intentions were good, his positively poor choice of analogy destroyed his message.

I can’t imagine telling a student, “Timmy, you can’t eat lunch because your mom couldn’t come to parent-teacher conferences” or “Sally, you can’t have breakfast since the governor thinks your dad is a dead-beat.”

Hyperbole aside though, kids don’t choose their parents or the situations in which they enter the world, and I have a strong suspicion that Lt. Governor Bauer’s message was lost because of this enormous gaffe. If he really thinks of people in such a manner, I fear for the needy in his state.

I had a friend of mine whose mother refused government assistance, and his cupboards were regularly bare. He recalled being given warm water to drink for dinner instead of cold water because the warm water made him “feel fuller.” It was a teacher who kept granola bars in her desk for him, so he could have breakfast every school day. (This is why I keep them in my desk now as well.)

On a personal note, the greatest irony to me in this entire debacle is not Bauer’s unthinking comments–I know many people who judge others without fully understanding the judged–but the idea that he’s advocating potentially reducing services at a time in modern history when those services may be the most needed. He was already a controversial person in his state, and this may be associated with him for the rest of his political career.