Comments on Week 1 Reading
This week’s readings provide very different takes on the state of equity and access
in American education today. As with all of the readings in this course, they are
intended to provoke questions in your mind, as well as to share information of
which you may not have been aware.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------The story of Cedric in A Hope in the Unseen offers a birds-eye view, very dark at
times, into the impacts on our schools from, and the lives of children in, lower socioeconomic conditions. We have a long way to go in reading this book, but we want to
stimulate consideration by you of some of the following points:
--Clearly, at least as far as we have read, Cedric is presented as being up against
formidable hurdles in his effort to get to MIT (or even someplace approximating that
university). Some of those hurdles appear to be his fellow students. At Ballou, as in
other schools around the country, an effort has been made to perform a sort of
triage (as Suskind puts it) on the student bodies, whereby a select few who have
shown promise are somewhat segregated from the rest of the school population,
who are left to experience the worst of US education. How do we feel about this
kind of stratification?
--How much responsibility should we place on communities that have schools
offering the kind of education that Ballou offers for the situations they are in, and for
getting out of that situation? How much responsibility do those of us outside these
communities have for improving the learning and life opportunities for children like
Cedric and his peers at Ballou?
--It seems that a good deal of Cedric’s forward progress, and hopefulness abut the
future, has resulted from the fact that he happened to land in Mr. Taylor’s chemistry
class. What can we realistically do to ensure that those connections between
teacher/mentors and students happen more often?
--------------------------------------------------------------------For those reading The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. In the opening couple of
chapters, we are provided with the context for Robert’s life. The author attempts to
paint a picture of Robert’s parents, extended family, neighborhood and city, and
early connection to the education system.
In the first two chapters, we have brought out to our attention the “systems” and
other factors which intersect to form the reality of a young low-income black child
whose pathway is vastly different from the one that the book’s author faced growing
up. The criminal justice system; housing challenges; single parenthood; and of
course the state of public education are all front and center immediately in this
story.
----------------------------------------In another reading, Linda Darling-Hammond is one of the leading figures in
education in this country and, as such, has a pulpit from which to share her research
findings and opinions. She is a speaker at many important conferences of education
thinkers and political leaders, and has a real ability to influence the way this country
thinks about education. She was considered strongly for Secretary of Education
under President Obama, from all indications.
She portrays the situation of inequity in our educational system as a crisis, one that
has moral, economic, political and other consequences for all of us, not just those
who are being directly left behind. Besides her pitch for strengthening the
educational experiences of “the nation’s most vulnerable and neglected students,”
this book is published as part of a “Multicultural Education Series” which, as the
Editor of the series states in his Foreword (which is worth reading, by the way), is
premised on the notion that multicultural education “fosters the public good and the
overarching goals of the commonwealth.” As we continue our reading in this book,
it will be interesting to see how Darling-Hammond makes that case and how you
feel about it.
One of the tasks we challenge you to undertake is to think deeply about some of
Darling-Hammond’s contentions. At first glance, they seem hard to argue with,
appealing to the sensibilities of many of us—but are they really the bedrock
principles we can build from? For example:
--How do you feel about the author’s contention, on page 2, that the “new mission of
schools is to prepare students to work at jobs that do not yet exist, creating ideas
and solutions for products and problems that have not yet been identified, using
technologies that have not yet been invented?” Is this the mission, and if we take
that approach, are we best serving the student population Darling-Hammond is
focused on here? Some of us believe that such an overwhelming focus on job
preparation and economic motivations is too narrow a view of what students need
to lead successful lives.
--Or how about this quote on page 3: “It also means finally making good on the
unmet American promise that education will be made available to all on equal
terms, so that every member of this society can realize a productive life and
contribute to the greater welfare.” Who made that promise? And as a nation—a
polity which elects representatives at all levels of government—is that really what
we want and believe?
Regardless of whether one believes that the US should be paying close (or
obsessive) attention to the leading international indicators of educational
accomplishment, one cannot help but be impressed by the author’s depiction of
what goes on in schools like those of Singapore. One can be excused for wondering
how such a wealthy country like ours has somehow not seen fit to invest in the same
way that Singapore has—even if we don’t totally approve of Singapore’s approach to
education.
The Flat World and Education, despite being published over ten years ago, is still
rich with valuable information and insights for today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Another required reading for the week is Cass Sunstein’s piece on the impacts of the
Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. If you are not familiar with that case, his
brief summary of it may not satisfy you so you should go online and seek more
description. Suffice it to say that it is typically held out by commentators as one of
the landmark Supreme Court decisions of all time, and it has been assumed to have
been an unmitigated positive development in equity and access for racial minorities.
The reason this piece is included here is because in his survey of the literature,
Sunstein produces evidence that some very bright thinkers do not see it that way.
Here are a few things to note in Sunstein’s article:
--he sheds some light on how Supreme Court decisions are arrived at. Striking was
Justice Reed’s thinking about why the Plessy decision should not be overturned, that
“Negroes had not assimilated into society” at the time of the Brown case. That
should arguably not have been a determining factor in the decision, and in fact may
have actually provided the exact reason that “separate but equal” needed to be done
away with.
--some of us may not have realized that the Brown decision actually “killed off”
Southern democratic liberalism, which some of us may also not have known even
existed, and set off a train of political events that has gotten us to our stalemated
federal political system today.
-- several experts, such as Klarman, believe that even without the Brown decision,
“racial reform” would have occurred due to other forces, which is consistent with
the view stated in the Sunstein piece that when “Courts appear most aggressive,
they are likely to be responding to social values.”
Perhaps most interesting is the view of Bell that the US progresses towards racial
equality only when it is in the interest of whites—how do you feel about that
position, does that resonate with you based on what you know of social history in
the US? This makes at least some sense in that in US democracy, one must muster
sufficient votes to compel action—whether inside the legislature or in the election of
our representatives. By definition, for now at least, minorities do not have the votes
themselves, in most cases, to compel action and so some percentage of the majority
has to be persuaded to ally themselves with the minority. This theory of “interest
convergence” as being a necessary condition for steps to be taken to address equity
and access, fortunately or unfortunately, seems to have some validity
Equally interesting is Bell’s view that the Supreme Court should actually have
affirmed the Plessy decision, upholding “separate but equal” facilities, BUT then
actually requiring that action be taken to make those separate facilities truly equal.
That would have been challenging to make work on a practical level, but it raises the
possibility of a scenario that might have yielded better educational results for the
populations Brown was meant to help. What do you think about this?