1.) Chapter One: In recounting her journey though many educational reforms, Diane Ravitch makes a number of provocative statements. Choose two quotes and personally respond to them.
Quote One: “School reformers sometimes resemble the characters in Dr. Seuss’s Solla Sollew, who are always searching for that mythical land “where they never have troubles, at least very few.” Or like Dumbo, they are convinced they could fly if only they had a magic feather.”
I chose this quote for its honesty. Since I have begun teaching I have been trying to figure out that mythical “perfect solution” that would solve the country’s education problems. I feel that with every book and article I read, we try so hard only to “band aid” our problems. We need to fix our system one problem at a time with the knowledge that nothing is ever going to be perfect. Even though our system will never be perfect there is one goal that we should aim for: equality for all, through education. By giving everyone access to the same education we would ensure that a true democracy survives for generations to come.
Quote Two: “I argued that certain managerial and structural changes- that is choice, charters, merit pay, and accountability-would help to reform out schools. With such changes, teachers and schools would be judged by their performance; this was a basic principle in the business world. Schools that failed to perform would be closed, just as a corporation would close a branch office that continually produced poor returns.”
I chose this quote because it got me at a personal level. Until May of this year, I was a firm believer in introducing free market forces to hold schools and districts accountable. This May my school was closed due to under-enrollment. I work for a charter school system of 4 (now 3) schools. My school, Metro Arts and Tech, was losing half a million dollars a year due to under-enrollment. Because my school was a charter school we were treated like a business. Like any business, if you lose money, you close. Metro was the first and only high school that the Bayview/Hunter’s Point community had seen in close to 40 years. We were the community school that was being placed at the center of neighborhood improvement. Market forces prevented that from happening and further marginalized the last working-class Black neighborhood of San Francisco. We need to treat education as a human right not as a commodity. Yes, if we subject schools to market forces we will close some bad schools, but we will also close schools in the neighborhoods that need a community school the most.
2.) Chapter Two: On page 16, Ravitch gives a brief definition of a well-educated person. How would you characterize a well educated person? What should any well educated person know in today’s world?
I feel that a well educated person has been given holistic interdisciplinary instruction in all of the fundamental subject areas of Math, Science, English, Social Science and the Arts (Music, Visual Arts, Performing Arts etc.). A person would able to apply what they learn in these classes to the real world and find connections between all subjects. A well educated person has the tools to ask, search for and find answers. In order to do this a person needs to master a native language, know how to analyze mathematical/scientific relationships, know how to use the scientific method in order to properly research and experiment, and know how to express themselves through various mediums.
3.) What would you have like to say and did not say about the 1st two chapters of the book.
So far I feel that the author is on point with her criticism. The one disappointing thing is that she has offered no solutions thus far. While I anticipate that she will, I have felt that the first two chapters have been very redundant criticisms of ANAR and NCLB.
4.) Choose one gap you listed from your subject area and identify 3 resources: a web site, an article, and a book that can help you fill that gap. List these and discuss what you learned from one of these.
Gap: How to identify with african american students and understand their culture
Book: Black Youth Rising by Shawn Ginwright
Review of the Book: Black Youth Rising by Shawn Ginwright
My colleague gave me this book to read this past April. It completely changed my perspectives of teaching Black youth. The most profound chapter is when Dr. Ginwright talks about taking 15 of his Oakland-native students to Ghana for a three week self discovery trip. Dr. Ginwright describes the moment as liberating because for the first time his students looked like everyone else. He further describes how people on the streets were calling his students brothers and sisters. On top of that, his students were discovering part of the culture heritage they had been missing. Dr. Ginwright’s point is that a lot of Black youth in urban america lack a cultural identity and when he brought his students to Ghana they began to find part of that identity. After reading this book, it changed my perspective on how my black students acted in my classroom. A lot of the street culture (the not so good parts... because there are some pretty cool parts to street culture) they brought to school was a result of a cultural identity crisis. While I still and will not ever fully understand this culture because I was not raised in it, Dr. Ginwright helped me look at my student’s behavior in a new light. While I will always be the goofy White science teacher in the front of the class, I will at least have a limited understanding on why my students act in a way that is so different from the way I acted in White suburbia growing up.
5.) Your annotations of resources are meant to be both scholarly and brief. In the blog, discuss in detail why/how any two of these articles were useful to your topic/questions. Consider such things as listing specific information you learned that you didn't know before. How this new learning leads to other questions or sources. Why is this writer was convincing. Whether you seek this writer out for other articles he/she has written and anything else you'd like to state in a blog that others can learn from and read.
Article One: Social–ecological resilience and environmental education: synopsis, application, implications
Plummer, R. (2010). Social-Ecological Resilience and Environmental Education: Synopsis, Application, Implications.Environmental Education Research, 16(5-6), 493-509.
This article was interesting because of the approach to took to explaining the Social-ecological resilience model. The author took a biological approach to explaining resiliency. The article focuses on taking environmental/ecological data and look at how the environment and populations respond to disruptions in their ecosystem. The author then further uses this model to explain resiliency in the social model. This article is very useful because I feel that we need to take a more biological approach when working with children. Studying social resiliency, what affects it and what role physiology plays in resiliency is important in designing a curriculum for my classroom. My next steps are to examine the role of physiology in resiliency and see if social interaction can change that physiology. This is important when looking at improving resiliency within trauma victims because trauma has been proven to rewire the memory and judgment regions of the brain.
Merrell, K. W. (2010). Linking prevention science and social and emotional learning: The Oregon Resiliency Project.Psychology In The Schools, 47(1), 55-70.
From this article, I learned that resiliency can be taught. The Oregon resiliency project was a 8 year long K-12 project that focused on fostering academic and emotional resiliency. This learning lead me to answer my question, can resiliency be taught? This article lead me to want to answer the question, what is resiliency and how do we measure it? Both of these questions are important in understanding and implementing my project. I need to know what to look for in my students and how to quantifiably measure that resiliency in order to see if my curriculum is working.
This writer was convincing because they used data to back up their claims. What I appreciated is that they also mentioned the weakness of the project and where to improve the project. For instance, the author stated that the project did not have much success in being pick up by high schools. As a result the project planners are trying to test out the curriculum in high schools over the next few years. I plan reading more about the Oregon Resiliency Project and trying to contact the project coordinators as an experiential learning source for my capstone project. While I feel that this source is related more to pedagogical-content knowledge and not pure content knowledge, I fell that it was useful because it gave me a source of potential curriculum to try in my classroom.
Blogs I have responded to:
Blogs I have responded to:
Allison Broude
Jessica Bender
In response to your response to the second quote in the first question, I remember working for the California State Legislature in college and listening to a floor debate about whether to raise the state cap limit on the number of schools the state could charter. I remember listening to legislators arguing to not raise the cap and couldn't understand why they would not want to. To me, a free market reform model seemed like a good idea. Looking back, I understand now why those legislators were against it. I think people today are ill-informed about many of policy reforms that make their way through the legislature. People are so ill-informed that they jump onto whatever bandwagon the media highlights that week. When the media says free-market reform is a good idea, everyone else seems to say its a good idea too; and we are all guilty of this at times, and its not always the fault of one. We can walk away from these lessons with an understanding that policy reform takes a great deal of research and exploration before we can go jumping on any bandwagon. We are fortunate to recognize and understand that know, and to have seen ourselves slip into the mainstream of whatever "great idea" governments are putting forth.
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