Rafferty SED 561

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...