Rafferty SED 561

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 ...

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 ...

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...