First of all, they did a great piece on the controversy surrounding charter schools, which have been a hallmark of Obama's education reform program. Articles in both the Boston Globe (here) and the Hartford Courant (here) outline conflicting sentiments in the communities most affected by charter school expansion. A major critique is that not all charter schools are actually better! The Courant article cites evidence from Philadelphia where a study showed that charter school students actually did not perform better than regular public school students. Also, the Globe article points out that in Boston (which has one quarter of the country's charter schools) non-English speakers are remarkably underserved; they make up less than 4% of charter school students despite being one fifth of all public school students.
From RaceWire:
Education historian Diane Ravitch says the question isn't regular versus charter schools, but an issue of social priorities:
We can't solve our problems by handing them off to businesses and community groups. Some schools will claim success by excluding the students who are hardest to educate; others will claim success by drilling children endlessly on test-taking skills.
What should we do? We must strengthen — not abandon — public education....
We evade our responsibility to improve public education by privatizing public schools. In doing so, we undermine the egalitarian promise of public education, thus guaranteeing that many children will continue to be left behind.
Even a charter school with a social mission of promoting economic and racial equity still runs up against the limits posed by selectivity and exclusion. The rush to expand this model across the country may renew, and redefine, the question of separate but equal.
I find this really interesting especially after talking to a friend of mine's older brother who is about to start teaching math in a new Philly charter school - I guess I'll have to ask him about what his experience is like, but he described a really energetic, young group of teachers that will have the ability to work with a smaller group of students than your average public Philadelphia high school. Clearly both benefits and drawbacks.
RaceWire also recently had a really interesting article about re-education programs in MI and MO about the history of racism and anti-indigenous sentiment, respectively. They say:
The new curriculum is designed to inform youth about the history of racial discrimination as well as to provide an understanding of the continued relevance of social movements today.
Um, not to get overly enthusiastic here but.. HELL. YES. It's absurd that students aren't learning about this already and while we'll see how it plays out I can't help but be excited that state governments are finally recognizing the importance of history in modern day struggles and tensions... and recognizing the need to be talking about this in our classrooms with our youth.
That is, of course, if our youth even get to the classroom. In New York, it seems that increasing numbers of children are being locked up in juvenile detention centers for mental health issues and other needs. "In New York State, 54 percent of children in the general population are Caucasian, 20 percent are Latino, 18 percent are African-American, and 6 percent are Asian. In contrast, of the girls admitted to the Lansing and Tryon facilities over the last three years, 54 percent are non-Hispanic African-American, 19 percent are classified as Hispanic, 23 percent are non-Hispanic White, and none is Asian. 10 girls, or 3 percent of the total, are Native American.... Since 1995, African-American boys and girls have consistently accounted for close to 60 percent of children taken into [Office of Children and Family Services] custody." Obviously this filters directly into New York's expansive prison system, and from the sound of these "juvenile centers" it seems as if these children are not socialized for any other kind of life. From RaceWire:
The Department of Justice’s extensive investigation of four of New York’s juvenile detention facilities sheds chilling light on a system plagued by unaccountability and abuse. The new report, released today, documents the routine use of excessive force by staff, which has traumatized and even broken the bones of children while authorities looked the other way. “Anything from sneaking an extra cookie to initiating a fistfight may result in a full prone restraint with handcuffs,” the investigators found.
So who are these kids? In 2006, Human Rights Watch profiled two of the detention centers investigated by the Justice Department, Tryon and Lansing, where teenage girls were detained for both violent and nonviolent infractions. Often, they were refugees of the foster care system, arrested after spending most of their lives cycling through the homes of strangers. Many began their path to “delinquency” in school, where “zero tolerance” security tactics were used to keep disobedient kids in line. Drugs and mental health problems drove many children into detention, after poverty and isolation from the healthcare system had kept them shut out of early treatment programs.
As the Times reported earlier this month, juvenile detention has become a makeshift "asylum" for children whose mental health needs have been neglected in their communities, due to poverty and social disinvestment.
If you can stomach the full article it can be accessed here.
No comments:
Post a Comment