Tag: equality

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Study: Education equals equality may be a fallacy

According to information posted by Brookings.edu, the mentality that education equals equality is not a reality. The data shows that education disparities aren’t getting better for poor people or minorities.

Brookings reports that “big gaps” remain for improving high school graduation rates for minorities and those considered poor.

The study also notes many low-income individuals are staying away from enrolling in college due to “tuition and debt worries.”

It is the failures of the American education system that highlight how far away we remain from some form of economic equality for those in the colorful minorities. Black and brown students are often outpaced by their white counterparts not due to a lack of trying or intelligence, it is the brevity of resources available to those students that prove to be an identifier as to why some educational numbers for minorities are so low.

Is the education equals equality mentality valid at all?

But the article isn’t totally a summation of negativity. Brookings presents solutions that may help to solve the growing problems in education in America.

For instance, one suggestion is that “there needs to be more flexibility in budgets at all levels of government to allow education innovations to be explored and services to be customized for students.”

Generally state legislators do not look kindly upon education budgets when cutbacks loom.

Another piece of guidance is to give parents and students more access to data to properly track school performance, offers, and to help track student progress as well.

In essence, there needs to be a more stringent focus on helping students who lag behind due to inefficiencies in our education system. Through no fault of their own, many students have fallen behind because of our collective nature to form monoliths around past successes.

Minority students and those from low-income families deserve our full attention, and if they do not receive it, our educational system will continue to fall farther behind other nations.

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Why preschool is a necessity, not a luxury

A guest column by Jonathan Gillentine

America needs high quality preschool programs to help address achievement and opportunity gaps affecting young children. In communities with extensive needs, these children and their families have few options for essential learning experiences that set a foundation for success in school.

Recently Congress has put forward bills that will eliminate Federal Preschool Development Grants, which since 2014 have helped 18 states establish new public preschool classrooms and have added supports to existing programs in communities that have the highest needs.

Why is preschool so important? As a preschool teacher with over 20 years of experience, I know that preschool offers learning opportunities that help kids grow in language development. In our classroom we used exciting events to expose children to meaningful language that they used to describe and understand their continuously growing world. They learned words like stabilize, alternate, spigot, momentum, and compost, plus many others.

Preschool also offers kids the opportunity to understand scientific and social concepts through which they begin to develop intellectual capacity. Teachers ask many open-ended questions of children to promote high-level thinking as they explore: How are you going to create a house for your toy cat? What does it need? or Why do you think the bugs are eating this plant and not the others around it? Such experiences are vital in that they promote independence; children see themselves as capable of finding answers rather than only looking to the teacher for ideas on what to do next.

Furthermore, preschool helps children develop a repertoire of skills they can use to solve social problems. Children can learn at a young age both to ask a peer to stop doing something or to invite a peer to help them. In my class, instead of refusing to share an item, children learned to say, “I’m using this now, but when I’m done, you can have the next turn.”

They also learned to understand the feelings of others by looking at facial expressions and body language. This helps form a sense of empathy. A child who can say, “It was an accident. Are you okay?” often doesn’t need a teacher to assist in resolving hurt feelings. This builds a sense of social and emotional competence. Considering the level of turmoil we face in this country concerning interpersonal conflict, providing children with skills and support to peacefully and respectfully resolve their differences is an invaluable investment.

Yes, adding preschool to federally supported programs won’t come cheap. Costs for qualified teachers and assistants, materials, and equipment quickly add up. But we know that the money we invest in preschool programs provides a significant return – in lower rates of remedial and special education, in better health of our citizens, and in higher rates of employment as these children reach adulthood.

Congress must continue to fund the Federal Preschool Development Grant Program. It is the only hope some of our children have for getting a running start at a successful, productive life.

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

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Dr. Jonathan Gillentine serves as Early Learning Specialist for Windward District in Kane`ohe, Hawai`i. He is a veteran teacher of 35 years, including 20 years as a preschool inclusion teacher, serving young children with developmental delays and children in Head Start. Gillentine is a National Board Certified Teacher, an America Achieves Teacher Fellow, and a Hope Street Group Hawaii State Teacher Fellow.

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Are black girls being pushed out of school?

A study released by law researchers at Columbia University shows evidence that of all groups, black K-12 female students are kicked or pushed out of school more than their peers. Altercations that may just call for a suspension or mediation for other students, for example, turn into expulsion or arrests in the case of black girls at rates that are alarmingly high.

The report,  Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, points to a school culture where young women of color are routinely looked over when it comes to providing a safe, nurturing environment for their learning. Things like “zero tolerance” policies appear to be interpretive for some K-12 students, but are almost always followed to the letter of the law with black young women.

This trend points to the larger issue of equality in our K-12 classrooms. If, as a body of educators, we truly are trying to graduate as many American kids as possible and find ways to reach them on an individual basis, how can stats like these be tolerated? Our culture of arresting first, and asking questions second, when it comes to all students of color is troubling because it changes the self-perception of these students.

Other research has shown that students who are considered “bad” or kicked out of classrooms at a young age are more likely to head to prison eventually. What good does this type of cycle do for anyone? Black female students are not the ones who need to change; the way we teach and treat them needs to change if we ever plan to reverse this trend.

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Epidemic of rights abuse fails black kids across the US

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

Noelle Witherspoon Arnold, University of Missouri-Columbia

As the world grapples with the containment of diseases such as Ebola, there is another epidemic that demands attentive responses, policies, and actions. It is one of grave proportions regarding the violation of basic civil and human rights in black communities across the United States. These violations end all too often in abuse, incarceration, and death.

Recent events in Ferguson after the death on August 9 of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of white police officer Darren Wilson in the suburb of St Louis, Missouri, have brought this crisis into sharp focus.

There is no way to discuss what has happened in Ferguson without addressing systemic structural and institutional racism. This includes the politics of poverty that presents the poor as complicit in their own deaths, missed educational opportunities, and economic ceilings.

In Brown’s case, insinuation and innuendo suggested he had stolen goods from a store and was a “thug”. At the same time, a narrative regarding education developed that labelled Brown as yet another black, unmotivated student.

In fact, he managed to graduate from a high school with one of the highest rates of poverty, unequal resources, and violence in Missouri – all of which contribute to low student achievement, little social mobility and economic stagnation. Often these conditions reproduce cycles of generational poverty that are felt in Ferguson and other poor communities of colour. Despite this, Brown’s family indicated he was headed to college with aspirations of starting his own business.

What to tell the kids

Even though President Barack Obama gave a stirring speech on race in 2008, America still cannot talk about it. Having a black president has made race more visible, but no less difficult to discuss, particularly with our children and students. This failure has created a new generation of victims and violators.

In new research about educational inequity at Ferguson, University of Pennsylvania researcher Shaun Harper notes:

As is typical in moments of racial eruption in the US, there will be an inclination to swiftly move on – to treat Ferguson as an isolated, unfortunate event that came and went. I suspect that few P-12 [school] teachers there or elsewhere across our nation even know how to talk with children about what happened in the St Louis suburb and the larger implications of this tragedy.

In fact, one school district in Illinois has banned talk of the issues in Ferguson even though research has shown that black students personalise racism even when it is not personally happening to them. This stands in contrast to encouragement by teachers and politicians to discuss other tragedies such as 9/11, which spawned whole curricula on the subject. Students and educators deserve the truth.

In the case of the Ferguson-Florissant school district and others like it, Harper says that: “Ferguson had structural problems that systematically disadvantage black families and youth long before a white police officer killed an unarmed black teenager.”

Rebalancing inequalities in schools

Even as educational scholarship explores issues of social justice, there is little movement by those who create education policy in ameliorating inequities for those who have not been well served in schools. There must first be racial and cultural sensitivity, relevance, and awareness of institutionalised racist practices in schools.

Second, teachers must be trained with a commitment to understanding and creating diversity, inclusive practice in schools, and a fostering of social relations across cultures. In addition, there must be continual dialogue and supportive, safe spaces in which youth and communities can process what happened.

The “wronged” parties – in this case black communities – should be involved in school curricula and policy. Although the concept of social justice remains a somewhat inchoate idea, the black community has a long history built around the constructs of advocacy, justice, and social change in schools and communities.

A history of abuse

Ferguson is only the newest failure of the larger society to substantially address these issues. Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, I know something about the impact of race and racism that manifests as a right to protest, demonstrate and protect oneself from harm. I recall an eerily familiar scene of 1960s: water hoses, now juxtaposed against current images of bullets and tear gas. These were crimes against humanity in heavy-handed shows of militarised force against those who dare to be wounded, fatigued, angered, and have the audacity to shine a spotlight on violence.

Brown’s funeral on August 25 drew a crowd of more than 4,000 to not only say goodbye, but also to show solidarity amid cries and tears for justice and restoration. Similarly, thousands attended the funeral of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955 Mississippi. Brown’s tale also has overtones of another St Louis period of unrest in 1968 at the unjust killing of another black man, Dr Martin Luther King.

And in this latest experience of déjà vu, the results are the same: the stripping of worth and humanity, the devaluation of the black life, and the criminalisation of youth of colour.

More than anything, Brown’s death has dispelled the myth of a post-racial world and revealed just how real racism is. It seems that “democracy requires hard work that we seem less and less willing to do”, a point argued by Yale law professor Stephen Carter his book Civility. Some would rather dehumanise and shame the victim of colour through misrepresentations, half-truths and outright lies than get down to that hard work.

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Noelle Witherspoon Arnold is the associate Professor, PK-12 Leadership & Policy at University of Missouri-Columbia

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Read the original article.

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Is Education the Most Important Civil Rights Issue of All?

Education is the single most important asset when it comes to equal Civil Rights, according to First Lady Michelle Obama. She made the remarks while addressing guests at the White House celebrating Black History Month — specifically celebrating the women of the Civil Rights movement. Mrs. Obama highlighted powerful women like Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Carlotta Walls LaNier who both faced the national spotlight for wanting an equal education during the height of the Civil Rights movement.

“Thanks to their sacrifice, there are no angry mobs gathering outside our schools. Nobody needs a military escort to get to class, but that doesn’t mean that our children don’t still face struggles when it comes to education,” said the First Lady, as reported by the Associated Press. 

She went on to say that quality education is the “single most important civil rights issue” of contemporary society, crediting her own education to her successes in life.

The First Lady seconds what I’ve long held to be a truth: inequality for Americans starts in our K-12 schools. The students with more resources and access to educational opportunities fare better in life. This is not to say that any one of our students is a lost cause, though. All schools should strive to elevate the learning experiences for each student, no matter what the circumstances.

Better distribution of federal funds and tax dollars is also something that needs to take place to ensure that all students have the same educational opportunities as their peers. Better equality in education will translate to more equal footing throughout society.