Edu 701 “The Flat World and Education” Notes
It’s no surprise to me, having began my teaching career in 2000, that there has been a major influx of minority and particularly latino students arriving to the United States each year. My classrooms have always been predominantly and increasingly latino. At the same time I know that our plan to bring these students up has been woefully inadequate. Thanks to this reading I’ve learned the big picture of this personal experience. About a million immigrants are making their way into the United States each year (Martin & Midgley, 2006). Ethnic minorities make up 100 of the total 300 million population in the U.S. And this trend will continue. Between 1974 and 2004, the percentage of students of color rose from 22 to 43 percent of the total population. In California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas they already exceed the number of Whites. And in two decades they will be the majority of students nationwide. Darling-Hammond shows in a detailed way how the achievement scores of low income students of color is lower than that of their white counterparts. This achievement gap, because of the large population of minority students, is going to have an increasingly important impact on our educational destiny. Most of these students, due to an apparent indifference, and a certain failure of our leaders, have been structurally excluded and marginalized in our societies and schools. Yet their status and attainment levels will increasingly affect our country’s future in an increasingly competitive world. Other countries have been doing much more to ensure equity in education for all students. Whereas the United States has been allowing inadequacies and inequalities in educational funding to persist, other countries have lifted themselves out of educational deficiencies through well planned, well funded, and equity based educational models. It is necessary to study their models and emulate them. The growing achievement gap, product of a mentality of poverty and the status quo’s incredibly shortsighted and “aggressive neglect” of minority students, has led to a school to prison pipeline. The United States, with 5% of the globe’s population, has 25% of its incarcerated people. Our high rates of incarceration are tied to undereducation, race, and poverty. Most U.S. prison inmates are high school dropouts and many are functionally illiterate and have learning disabilities. The majority are people of color. State spending on prisons has outpaced spending on schools by three to one. A reversal of this funding would have exponentially beneficial effects on the wellbeing of our economy, race relations, and the common good. Through education, we have to improve race relations in this country. Darling-Hammond’s “sobering yet hopeful” book points a way for educators to act decisively and thoughtfully through specific policies and school reforms that must take place in order to stop our nation’s academic decline. The political will that is necessary to improve this situation has to arise out of our democratic ideals of social justice and equality. Only equitable and multicultural education can foster the common good and the overarching goals of the commonwealth. What our leaders still don’t realize is that we will not succeed if we don’t bring everybody up together. I’m reminded of my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay. This is a country like the United States in that it has a culture, or mentality, of poverty. In the past century, Paraguay has been a supplier of agricultural goods such as cotton, beef, and soybeans. It’s economy has not depended on a highly educated workforce. It’s educational system and society has reflected this. The wealthy hold on to their wealth and do not invest in education and the common good. They live behind brick walls in mansions and drive expensive cars. Yet outside these walls the streets are dirt, and poverty reigns. As a result they, along with the entire country, suffer. The United States seems to be following in their footsteps. Increasing wealth disparity, where the top one percent of the population now controls virtually all of the capital, has had devastating effects on our communities. Rather than seeing education as a means to bring everybody up, has been seen as just another way to make money off of the backs of its people, in the form of student loans. Sadly, I’ve learned from this book that California has been one of the worst if not the worst offender in providing quality education for all students. It is very ironic that our state, being the original hub of technological innovation, has not invested in the education of its own population. It relies on highly educated workers from abroad to fill highly skilled and high paying positions in this increasingly “flat” world. It has not been easy being a teacher here. Our inadequate funding, off target educational priorities in content and assessment, and punitive system of accountability have been palpably inadequate for myself and fellow educators. At the state level, the poor argument that increased funding will not improve educational outcomes has been used more than once to excuse a lack of equitable funding. Status quo backed Prop 13 has severely limited the state’s ability to fund schools. As of yet there has not been the political will to reverse Prop. 13, for a start, and adequately fund our schools. The missteps the state has made in educating our children make me wonder if we, too, are intentionally under-educating our children so that they will continue to fill our agricultural positions (like in our local wine industry), much the same as in Paraguay. Yet, Darling-Hammond shows that increased funding must also be accompanied by directing of funds to the right goals. Calistoga is a good example of this. It is an interesting place to work. Since beginning to teach here four years ago, I feel that for the first time we have enough money to spend on our students. We are a “direct aid” school that gets all of its funding from local taxes. Money comes from tax revenue from high property values and wine tourism. Yet even with adequate funding, our minority students (about 85% of the total student population), still fall short of academic achievement expectations. The problem would appear to be so systemic that even adequate funding at the local level is not enough to close the achievement gap between our minority students and white counterparts. We have to do better, and Darling-Hammond outlines the main targets that increased funding must target: These include (1) meaningful learning goals; (2) intelligent, reciprocal accountability systems; (3) equitable and adequate resources; (4) strong professional standards; and (5) organization of schools for student and teacher learning. These kinds of systemic changes need to happen at the state if not national level. It’s good to see however that local initiatives such as this master’s program in innovative learning we are participating in, where NapaLearns is funding half of our teachers’ tuition, are attempting to close the achievement gap and update our educational models to address the demands of a technological, fast changing 21st century jobs market, and 21st century multicultural reality.
2 Comments
Ryan Strole
9/23/2019 10:31:11 pm
Thanks for your comments, Jeremy. I think I share the frustration and perhaps bewilderment reflected in your response. I'm interested in your experience working in Calistoga as a basic-aid district. There's so much said about basic-aid in terms of the per-pupil spending, it's nice to hear everything isn't perfect behind the curtain.
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Jeremy SMith
9/25/2019 07:25:29 pm
Great comments, Ryan! I agree with you! I'll take another look at those pages. It sure does take more than money.
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AuthorJeremy Smith teaches third grade at Calistoga Elementary School. Archives
July 2020
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