KOZOL CHAPTERS 11/12B. STARK APRIL 8, 2015

B. Stark 4/8/15

Chapter 11: Deadly Lies

No Child Left Behind

Kozol sees a sustained attack on “many teachers who do not ascribe to the beliefs and practices that are embodied in” NCLB (265)

Pres. Bush “accused those who disagree with him …of being the unconscious bearers of ‘soft bigotry’”

Paige (former education secretary) accused National Education Association (teachers union) of being “’a terrorist organization’” for criticism (265) [See also Margaret Spellings]

Deadly Lies

Standards-based reforms

“No strong evidence linking additional resources to improved performances” (267)

See: Standards and Assessment Group and Accountability Group

According to Kozol, what are the results of standards-based reforms?

Deadly Lies

Other failed educational reforms include “open schools” or “free schools” (See 270-1)

What are the results of having a “distinctive pedagogy” for children? (272)

Deadly Lies

OTHER issues:

“Niche academies” attract children of white families vs. career-based niche academies that are “clearly targeted at poor children of color” (276)

Preferential treatment of children at these academies (“The teachers and students of the large school sometimes ooze resentment at the small school starting up within their walls” (277)

1990s: Monroe High School in the South Bronx had a business and Law Academy; high turnover of administrators; colossal dropout rate; 97% black and Hispanic (277); See also 278 and 279

Deadly Lies

Achievement gap between black and white children narrowed until the 1980s; opened in the 1990s (280)

Strict accountability (no flexibility)

Media skews information (281)

Schools make radical adjustments to calendars, classes, cut back on music, art, recess, phy ed) in order to comply to state demands for testing

Deadly Lies

Dropout rates at hyper-segregated secondary schools remains high 48% of high schools in nation’s 100 largest districts

(highest concentrations of black and Hispanic students) less than 50% of the entering 9th graders graduate in 4 years (282)

75% don’t on the national level (1993 – 2002) (282) Graduation rates have frozen or dropped for black and

Hispanic students This affects the university level as well: 2004

Washington Post: 350 African-American freshmen enrolled at University of Michigan out of entering class of 6,000 students; lowest number in 15 years, decline of 500 from nearly 3 years earlier (282)

Deadly Lies

Changes in affirmative action policies

Increased in tuition costs (Florida; Demos.org)

Low SAT scores for African Americans

Widening gulf in math and reading levels between races (283)

Chapter 12: Treasured Places

“The Issues are big; children are small” (285)

“In these settings, teachers do not tend to let concerns about our nation’s competition in the global marketplace intrude upon the more important needs of childhood, such as the right to find some happiness in being children” (286)

Treasured Places

Teachers who see creativity at schools will want to BE at those schools (286)

Standardized tests may still be required “but nobody tells the children that their test results define their worthiness or that these numbers measure their identities, or that the limited forms of learning that are tested by a standardized exam are more important than the ones to which governmental numbers cannot be attached” (287).

Treasured Places

Descriptions of teachers who engage in eccentric and fun (creative) behaviors --“eccentric” (295) See: Mr. Bedrock (mature teacher) Story: 292-295

Human, caring, community-oriented (“Virtually all the truly human elements of teacher motivations have been locked out of the market misperceptions that control so much of education policy today; but when we go back to the schools in which these market ideologies have been most valiantly resisted, we are reminded of a set of satisfactions and devotions that are very different from the ones that dominate the present discourse about urban education” (297).

Treasured Places “Teachers and principals should not permit the beautiful

profession they have chosen to be redefined by those who know far less than they about the hearts of children” (299).

“The schools where children and their teachers are still given opportunities to poke at works, and poke around into the satisfactions of uncertainty, need to be defended7 from the unenlightened interventions of the overconfident. These are the schools I call ‘the treasured places.’ They remind us always of the possible” (300).

See: Teachers see creativity as cure for math trauma (Tampa Bay Times, March 29, 2015): http://www.tampabay.com/incoming/educators-embrace-new-methods-to-cure-math-trauma/2223147

The End