Posts

Week 14, November 28th

Image
A New Educational Policy Paradigm The reading this week was entitled “What “Counts” as Educational Policy? Notes Towards a New Paradigm” by Jean Anyon. Anyon mentions early on in the article that there is “still no large urban district that can demonstrate high achievement in even half of its students or schools” (66) despite many decades worth of educational policy that have been pushed through to improve the academic success in urban schools. She argues that there are a few fundamental reasons why educational policies have failed urban schools over the years, the main reason being that none of these policies have addressed the issue of poverty that many families in urban districts experience. She says, “Individual and neighborhood poverty builds walls around schools and classrooms that education policy does not penetrate or scale” (79). Rather than focusing on the successes and failures of educational policies over the years, Anyon addresses federal and state economic policies that ...
3 comments
Read more

Week 13, November 21st

Image
Neoliberalism, Privatization, and Globalism The first reading this week, entitled “Local Control, Choice, Charter Schools, and Home Schooling” is an excerpt from Joel Spring’s book American Education. Spring encourages the reader to imagine an “education chair” and decide who should be in control of this chair. In other words, who gets to decide the moral instruction, the shaping of behavior, and the transmitting of knowledge that takes place in schools. Spring provides background on the different groups that hold a stake in the outcomes of public education, including school boards, charter schools, parents, online educational programs, and for-profit global education corporations. In his conclusion, Spring states that whoever we decide should hold the power of the education chair, “the political structure of education determines the content of education that in turn directly affects what a student learns” (243). The second article, “Race, Charter Schools, and Conscious Capitalism: On ...
3 comments
Read more

Week 11, November 7th

Image
Culturally Responsive Teaching, Community-as-Text Education, and Healing Centered Engagement A common theme of this week’s articles is community engagement within school curriculum through culturally responsive teaching. The authors of these three articles describe the importance of involving students in their community in order for them to see a purpose for their learning. It can also serve as an opportunity for emotional healing for those who have experienced trauma. In the first article, “Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers”, Villegas and Lucas call for the infusion of multicultural issues throughout teacher education curriculum and introduce six different characteristics of a teacher who is culturally responsive. A culturally responsive teacher understands their own sociocultural identity and recognizes how modern schools still pin different cultural identities against one another and perpetuate a system of discrimination. They hold the belief that all children are capable of...
4 comments
Read more

Week 10, October 31st

Image
Precious Knowledge “Precious Knowledge” is a documentary that showcases a legal struggle between a Mexican-American Studies program, also known as La Raza Studies, being implemented in Tucson Unified School District and Arizona state legislation. The film begins by highlighting typical class instruction in the program and student interviews. In the late 90’s/early 2000’s, the dropout rate of Mexican-American students was among the highest of any other racial group. Gilbert, a student featured in the film, says at the beginning, “Sometimes I feel like the education system is so against me, that they don’t want me here. That they want me to just drop out.” Other students expressed that they were having trouble earning good grades and staying engaged in school. With the introduction of ethnic studies to the school curriculum, students were given the opportunity to learn about the history of their culture, to look at this world through a critical lens, and ultimately are taught the ...
3 comments
Read more

Week 9, October 24th

Image
School-to-Prison Pipeline Jean Anyon described a “hidden curriculum” in schools, where students are being prepared for the social class that they are brought up in. Working class students engage in rote learning and are taught to obey authority, and elite class students are given opportunities to expand their thinking and solve real-world problems. The two articles we read this week introduce another “class” of students to the mix-- the criminal class. We examine the Latino and LGBTQ student populations and are provided with many examples of how these students in particular are marginalized and treated in ways that oftentimes pushes them out of school and straight into the criminal justice system. In the article “Smoking Guns or Smoke & Mirrors”, Rios and Galicia describe how “administrators, educators, and SROs can label youths of color as “animals,” “inmates,” or “killers,” and they can also project criminal futures onto their students, as well as lead their students to believe ...
4 comments
Read more

Week 8, October 17th

Image
Standardized Racism Lamawaima and McCarty push for a critical democracy-- one that “demands that the United States be a nation of educational opportunity for all, not merely a homogenizing and standarding machine, unable to draw strength from diversity”-- in their article “American Indian Education and the Democratic Ideal”. They describe the struggle of Native American tribes to maintain their sovereignty through bilingual/bicultural education programs and community-controlled schools. Research has shown that when students are given the opportunity to receive long-term schooling in their heritage language, their academic performances surpass those of their peers who are taught in English only. In addition, when Indigenous community-controlled schools were at their peak in the 1970s, Native American students reported a positive self-image, improved confidence, and increased interest in learning. However, these schools and educational programs are constantly fighting a battle against th...
3 comments
Read more

Week 6 Blog, October 3rd

Image
National vs. Cultural Identities  This week’s reading, entitled ““I Was Born Here, but My Home, It’s Not Here”: Educating for Democratic Citizenship in an Era of Transnational Migration and Global Conflict”, is an in depth study of how Palestinian American students perceive their national and cultural identities and how Palestinian Americans are viewed in the “imagined community” of the United States. The author, Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, worked with many Palestinian students over the course of the study and analyzed their words and actions to discover how they identified both culturally and nationally. Many of the students describe themselves as holding U.S. citizenship but being Palestinian, even though they were born in the US and lived there at the present time. The students all demonstrated that they have strong connections with Palestinian culture. Some students describe that even though the conditions in Palestine are tougher as far as access to medical services, a decent e...
3 comments
Read more