Waiting for Superman

            Waiting for Superman brought up some really interesting things that I had never considered before. So often we blame society, poor funding, and standardized testing for the problems in schools, but we rarely consider poor teaching to be a significant issue. Of course we have all have had poor experiences with teachers, but I never thought of it as a systemic problem. The saying, ‘those who cannot do, teach’ is really untrue. I think that some people are just naturally better at teaching than others, but it is a skill that can be developed and improved. Having programs in place to teach teachers how to be better at their job may help resolve some of these issues as well as somehow weeding out people who just should not be teaching at all.

            Some people, even with all the training in the world, may just not be good teachers or have any desire to be good teachers. In middle school I had a science teacher who told us straight out that she did not want to be teaching. Her husband had an accident and was no longer able to work so she had to get a job and chose teaching for some reason. Her method of teaching was to assign us during class to read the chapter we were studying and then answer questions in the workbook on a separate piece of paper. She would then read out the answers and we were supposed to write out the ones we missed. Our test for each chapter would be the exact questions, in the same order, in the workbook we had already gone over in class. Needless to say, I made an A in that class, but I learned absolutely nothing.

            However, I do have a problem with the blame for poor student performance being placed directly and only on the teachers. Geoffrey Canada said that teachers had to accept that their students came from dysfunctional home situations and that was not an excuse for those same students not learning. However, I think it takes a very good teacher to overcome these sort of issues and instill a desire to learn in his or her students. In an ideal world every teacher would be an excellent teacher, but I think there is a huge demand for teachers that is just not always being met. In Shame of the Nation, Kozol wrote about how often the teachers shuffled around, some classes having several teachers in the same year because they cannot handle the pressure. I think the problem starts with the fact that we do not pay teachers enough to teach in difficult teaching environments. Kozol wrote that teachers who work in segregated schools make much less money than those who work in wealthy public schools and private schools. There is no incentive for a good teacher to work in a school that really needs a good teacher. 

 

            The movie makes a point that learning starts with a good teacher but does not answer the question of where a good teacher comes from. Of course it is important to get rid of teachers who can’t teach and those problems should be addressed. At the same time if we take the poor teachers out of the system, what are we replacing them with? Can even a good teacher be successful in a classroom with over thirty kids and limited materials? 

            Also, I found the lottery part of the film extraordinarily depressing. I was definitely rooting for certain kids and when their names or numbers were not called I hated watching their faces and the disappointment was terrible for them and their parents who had been hoping for them to be chosen. I guess it helps to think about how a charter school is not the answer to all problems, certain schools methods have been criticized, etc. However, it just seemed that the families pinned so many of their hopes on winning the lotteries. 

            I did not like how the film seemed to consider the charter schools the only way for the kids to have any possibility of graduating and getting into college. Maybe their high school had a higher than forty percent drop out rate, but that did not mean that these individual kids were never going to achieve their dreams, though I suppose the point was to portray them as representatives of all the kids going to so-called drop-out factories. I think I got most attached to the little girl who wanted to be a veterinarian and her family. I can totally relate since I wanted to be a veterinarian for the longest time. She seems determined and I hope all that negativity surrounding her potential at the public high school was not present in her actual life.

Week 2

I was not sure what to write about here seeing as I wrote about Kozol last time and I am beginning to tutor at the I Have a Dream Foundation on Thursday so I decided to relate some of my other coursework to this class, specifically the film Examined Life.

            This semester I am working on my economics thesis paper, which I plan to be an analysis of the market for collectable items. This market is difficult to define since just about any item can be collected. I have read some papers that describe the various things people collect ranging from empty beer cans to antique oarlocks. However, collectable items are different from things people collect in that collectable items are part of a set, presumably one outlined by the manufacturer but often retrospectively by antique enthusiasts. Russell Belk, author of Collecting in a Consumer Society, describes collecting as “the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences”.

            This topic may seem random since I do not consider myself a collector. However, I was led into this topic as a result of my family’s obsession with the Beanie Baby fad in the late nineties. When I was considering ideas for my project, I kept coming back to the idea of fads and how something people fight over in stores becomes something I keep in the back of my closet now. I shudder to think how much money was spent on my enormous Beanie Baby collection and wonder what made us purchase all of them. Since only in hindsight is really possible to identify a fad, I went in another direction. Collectables are so useless really and yet people obsess over them and get extremely attached to their collections.

            In some ways, collectors are seeking connections with other collectors, describing their feelings at interacting with other collectors of the same good as being the only time they feel they are truly understood. In other ways collecting drives people away. Examples are described in which collector’s children feel they are in competition with the collection for their mother or father’s attention.

            What really reminded me of this class and the film Examined Life had to do with what Peter Singer spoke about while he was walking down a street in a major shopping district of New York City. He was speaking about ethics and he said that when we choose to spend money on one thing we are choosing not to spend money on another thing. In other words, by choosing to purchase one more cup of coffee, I am choosing not to spend my money giving someone in an underdeveloped country clean drinking water. He says that the choices we make are unethical.

            Collecting is just an extreme example of our habit of surrounding ourselves with things. In another article by Russell Belk titled, Collecting as Luxury Consumption: Effects on Households and Individuals, we are introduced to Marsha and Julian, both avid collectors. Among their collections they own over two hundred antique oarlocks, six hundred doilies, over a thousand astronomy books, forty-seven rocking chairs, and more than two thousand plates, cups, and saucers (To be fair, they are an extreme example, though Belk differentiates between collectors and hoarders in that they do not collect randomly, others may perceive what they own as having value). They realize they have a problem when they are unable to fit a recent acquisition to their furniture collection into their house. 

            The couple ends up paying somebody to come and get rid of all their stuff for them. When they return to their house after it has been emptied, they express a feeling of emptiness. Without their things, Julian comments about his home, “It is cold out there, inhospitable, alien. There’s nothing there, nothing contained in nothing. Nothing at all” (478). I believe this statement says something about how we see our lives without the protection of things.

Week 1

Martha Nussbaum in Examined Life spoke about the influence of the traditional approach of philosophers like Hobbes and Locke on popular culture. Their approach began with assumptions as to how people will act in the so-called “state of nature” meaning without governments to corral them into acceptable behavior.  In popular culture this approach has made it okay or provided an excuse for selfishness since everyone is out for themselves, tying into the puritanical idea that working hard will lead to material benefits. It follows that the poor have not worked hard enough and are to blame for their own situation, undeserving of public assistance.

However, what people think they earned in many cases is in fact the product of a history of privilege. This relates to what Jonathan Kozol writes in Shame of the Nation, that disadvantaged children are the product of disadvantaged adults and judging them by the same standardized tests by which we judge advantaged children is wrong. An eight year olds' poor work ethic is not truly to blame for poor performance on standardized tests, especially when compared to children of the same age given twice the number of years of education. 

What it comes down to is that people are unwilling to pay for another child’s education when it does not directly benefit their own child. Wealthier people may be uncomfortable with the unfairness of the current education system, but they are ultimately unwilling to provide more money to disadvantaged children when that money can go to their own children and they pressure the system to keep possible money drains, or poor children, out of their own children's classrooms. At the same time there is a fear that students starting behind others will take up more time, keeping more advanced students behind. Even within schools they split up classes into children better or worse at certain subjects, for example my elementary school split us into upper, middle, and lower level math and reading classes beginning in fourth grade. 

         

Kozol’s experiences in Shame of the Nation remind me of my high school experience in some ways. I went to school at one of the more high performing public school in Cabarrus County. Though nearly forty years old, the school had a history of performing highly on standardized tests, having a large number of advanced placement classes and a reputation of good teachers. Then in 2008 a new school opened in Harrisburg, closer to where I lived. My graduating class was allowed to finish at the older school since we were graduating that year. That year, many of my peers were discussing some of the gossip we had been hearing from the teachers, like that our year was the last good one, and the juniors coming up behind us were a lot less motivated. I noticed teachers retiring, for example both my AP Chemistry and my AP Statistics teachers retired that year. 

            I realized that the new school opening was splitting the school district socioeconomically, what Kozol calls re-segregating. The newer school was absorbing students from the more wealthy neighborhoods and my school was keeping the students from the less wealthy neighborhoods. Within a year of my graduation, my old high school was implementing extremely strict dress codes (no jeans and no wearing the color red), and many of my teachers had moved to other schools. My former civics and economics teacher who actually graduated from the same high school and had taught there for decades retired within two years of my graduation. Everyone I talk to about that is so surprised because of how often she spoke about loving the school. 

It seemed as though all the teachers with years of experience were finding jobs at better schools or retiring, which leads me to this article

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/27/teach-for-america-met-wit_n_1114995.html

From the article, “Many countries… send the strongest and most experienced teachers to work with the lowest performing students. The U.S. has done the reverse. There are nearly twice as many teachers with fewer than three years' experience in schools where students are predominantly low income and minority”.

This is an article I thought was interesting in relation to Kozol’s observation that many of the teachers he met in these schools were inexperienced and the schools had extremely high teacher turnover rates. I wondered if any of those he met may be involved with Teach for America though at least the one, Mr. Endicott from chapter three, was involved in a separate program which exchanged work in low-performing schools for education classes. 

I think the idea behind Teach for America is good, the view that new blood and new ideas will reinvigorate a lagging school (like in Freedom Writers!). However it also seems a little illogical to put the least experienced teachers in such a difficult situation. Most of the teachers Kozol spoke to were probably not involved in the program, which raises the question of why experienced teachers do not want to work in these schools - pretty obvious going off of Kozol’s discussion of comparative teacher salaries.

Kozol’s point is that there are many factors going into the failure of these schools beginning with a lack of funding and pre-K programs that put students at a disadvantage before even starting school. Segregating the schools into disadvantaged and advantaged or minority and Caucasian perpetuates this problem.

            Also a video of Jonathan Kozol speaking at Sonoma State University. He seems like a pretty funny guy.