To tout his education plan, Mitt Romney visited an inner city charter school in West Philadelphia this week, where he talked about class size and importance of technology. What he didn't talk about is how the achievement gap shrinks when children from different backgrounds attend the same schools. Up host Chris Hayes, along with Dana Goldstein of The Nation, Pedro Noguera, sociology professor at NYU, Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, and MSNBC contributor Karen Hunter discuss the many benefits of desegregation in schools.
Desegregation and making schools work
Sat May 26, 2012 1:12 PM EDT
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It fascinates me that the entire education debate pointedly ignores the one reform that is the easiest to accomplish and most likely to succeed. The whole debate is about finger pointing. Blaming teachers, blaming parents, blaming administrators, blaming government.
When one seriously looks at the history of American eduction, three things become instantly apparent; 1) the system was functionally designed to produce large numbers of factory works who took orders well and did not ask questions, innovate, or think critically, 2) it is succeeding at this staggeringly well, and 3) that success is exactly the problem. The US education system si succeeding staggeringly well at exactly the thing we do not need it to be doing.
THe next time you (or anyone) does a roundtable on public education, try this. Place all the participants chairs in a square facing the moderator, and see how well the discussion goes. That is the problem with American education, The class rooms are no structured to facilitate thinking, they are structured to facilitate obedience and absorption. If we want to have an education system that prepares our children for an entrepreneurial market that requires critical thinking (or thinking at all) we need to functionally restructure classrooms in a roundtable format. The teacher in front, and the students in a circle around the classroom. And yes, you would have fewer students to a classroom...why are you saying that like its a bad thing, may i ask?
Who can anyone "think critically" if they have never learned how to do math, never learned any history of science, and spend their school years reading politically correct literature and "discovery" math and science all over again.
Pedro Noguera is correct in saying NCLB did one thing, make minority students visible. It also became big business for George Bush's friends and brother Jeb. Amy Goodman is right about Pearson Learning Co. making big big buck testing kids to death. Karen Hunter is having us look at the elephant in the room which is we segregate poor students into our worst schools. Arizona's Attorney General (who is being investigated for voter fraud by FBI) created a segregated program for English learners where they are together, at least half the day. Dana Goldstein states the reality that middle class students gain when integrated, everyone gains. The Mexican American studies program in Tucson, Arizona was very successful lowering the drop out rate of Latinos to 7% where state average is more than 50% and Tom Horne led the movement to abolish it, together with Russell Pearce and the present State Superintendent and that successful program is gone and the teachers gone, too. What Vicki Abeles film Race to Nowhere where she speaks of how the over testing of students have led to suicide and being able to pass the test to have to take remedial English and Math in college because, though students can pass the tests, they have no academic foundation. The only thing that improves academic achievement is "quality teachers". We must invest in improving our public school teachers. Dana Goldstein also says good people can't be replicated, but there are 90/90/90 schools throughout the U.S. with 90% minority, 90% poverty and 90% above the state academic averages. Let's spend some money finding out how they do it. I love how Goldstein also says other countries takes care of their young people's basic needs so public school teachers can teach them because the greater society is caring for them. Our heroic/sheroic public school teachers are charged with doing it all...for low pay, and constant attacks from Republicans.
One wonders why we can't look at the top 3 performing countires in the world and ask what they are doing right. More to the point especially on the earlier discussion of desegregation in the schools, look at Finland which is in the top three in reading, mathematics, and science. It might shake up our egocentric view of competition and testing when the Finns just wanted to make sure that all their kids got an equal education (equal funding by government) and as a by product, got great results. They quit all the grading and testing bs and let the teachers teach. Interesting concept
Finland has one of the most homogenous populations in the world. do you really think that there if all public schools were funded at the same level, that blacks and Hispanics would perform at the same level as Whites and Asians?
Actually Finland does not have one of the most homogeneous peopulations and their number of immigrants has doubled in the last ten years. We have many states that have similar demographics and ethnic diversity and yet Finland out performs them hands down. Instead of wallowing in denial you might actually examine their system. I refer you to the article written by Anu Partanen in the Atlantic:
The second biggest ethnic group in Finland after Finns are Swedens and many of the immigrants are from Russia and Estonia. In the U.S., all of those groups would be counted as White, Non-Hispanic. #Ethnic_minorities_.26_languages
What was amazing was that an Ivy League educated college professor, Pedro Noguera, showed during the discussion on education that he does not understand Simpson's Paradox. 's_paradox
It is impossible to have a discussion concerning education with people to refuse to understand the real meaning of diversity and refuse to understand basic educational statistics.
Take a look a Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, et al, who have state run education systems that have almost zero ethnic diversity and they do not measure up to Finland. So while ethnic diversity could be a factor, it is not the driving factor in these states. But hey, we can't learn about health care from Europe, so why would we want to lean about education. After all we are the United States of America. We are number 37th or something.
The entire U.S. is 37th or in the middle of the pack. However, if you compare whites in the U.S. against the whites in other countries, the margins are much smaller.
Also, the white kids in North Dakota and Montana outperform the white kids in Illinois, California, or New York even though those states spend much more per students.
In Illinois, there was a study of spending and school performance, and the results were that spending is mildly negatively correlelate with school performance. The U.S. cannot spend enough to help blacks and Hispanics perform at the level of whites.
A joke in the right wing blogs is that the only way to make black and white performance the same in the U.S. would be to hit all of the white kids in the head with a hammer. You seem to come from the hammer hit school of improving schools.
Chris Hayes did a wonderful job of reminding the panel, and the rest of us, that we must keep the education issue broad to make changes, and not pinpoint minutia that may affect someone personally.
I found it odd to listen to five private university graduates (four of them Ivy Leaguers and three specifically from Brown University) discussing how to improve public school education.
The real elephant in the room is that there is nothing that the government can do that will raise academic achievement for blacks and Hispanics with also raising the academic performance of whites and Asians.
What most Ivy League educated progressives seem to really want is to lower the performance of white and Asian public school students to the point that their performance is no different than poor blacks or Hispanics.