Wednesday, February 09, 2005

EVASIONS UNDERLIE CURRENT EDUCATIONAL THEORY

Post lifted from Turin He is discussing an influential educational reformer who helped get busing introduced in Boston

Kozol's school, with white teachers and Black students, was in chaos. "White was overcome in black among them, but white and black together were overcome in chaos."(P. 29.) What was the source of the chaos? For Kozol, the school's discipline and the racial bigotry of the teachers were the sources of the chaos. Of course, many social observers said that the chaos was already inside the students when they came to school. This view was the official position of the Boston school board. The chaos was created by social disorganization of the Black family and community. Kozol tackled this issue by retelling a conversation he had with a white (presumably Jewish) landlord in Roxbury. "I remember a talk that I had around that time with a man who owned a lot of property in the Negro section and who made a great deal of money out of this property..."(P.140.) The landlord thought that the schools gave a poor education to the Black students; nonetheless:

"'The schools are doing a wonderful job with what they've got. You take these kids from homes like those and parents from all over no place and everything all mixed up and nobody living right and how on earth do you expect a day in school to change that child's life?'"(P. 140.)


Kozol countered that the physical facilities of the school were poor and uncomfortable. Windows were broken. A window fell in on Kozol's class. Two classes shared the same room. Attentive teaching and learning was physically impossible. The landlord responded:

"'We did it, and we never had any fancy schools either and nothing special for us, no special classes or stuff like that. And if we did it then I don't see why can't they?'"(P.140-141.)


"We" were the Jewish families and Jewish community who lived in Roxbury a generation earlier. Jews had been able to obtain social mobility through education and move out of Roxbury's poor buildings. Jews had been advance in the face of discrimination and prejudice. Why could not African Americans do it also? That indeed was the question. Kozol, who was Jewish, evades it. (Instead of answering the question, Kozol accuses the landlord of hypocrisy. On the basis of Black rents, Kozol notes, the landlord sent his child to a "sophisticated little French school outside of Boston" [p. 141].)

There was no way for Kozol to answer the question. In 1965, the Department of Labor released Daniel Moyniham's report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The report documented - again - the well-known fact of Black family instability and its consequences. (Du Bois and Frazier had both analyzed it at length earlier.) The contrast to the strong family structure of the Jews and the role of the Jewish family as the base of Jewish community culture was obvious and clear.

It was not the law of the land in America (as it was in France, for instance) that the family was the basis of the nation's social structure; so it was not the law of the land that social policy should establish racial equality in family stability. It was the law of the land, however, that social policy should make schools equal; so schools bore the burden of repairing the damaged subjectivities of children attending them. And this is the story Kozol tells while disguising and evading the central issue.





SURPRISE, SURPRISE!

LOS ANGELES: The L-A Unified School District spent nearly 50 (m) million dollars on a computer reading program that failed to improve student literacy skills.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the district bought the system four years ago to boost test scores at low-performing elementary schools. The Waterford Early Reading Program was used to supplement language arts instruction in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. However, a review of school district records reveal the system had no affect on most students and had a "negative impact" on some kindergartners whose teachers substituted it for primary reading lessons.

In other cases, some teachers were too busy covering the district's rigorous reading curriculum to devote enough time and energy to the computer lessons. Some teachers simply didn't know how to use the program, and some couldn't because of computers that froze and broken headsets. The findings prompted the district to order schools to limit the technology's use to struggling students. Now, school officials are questioning whether the program was worth so much of the district's funds.

Source

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

***************************

No comments: