EDF3604 - Social Foundations of Education

A New Yorker article following up on the marshmallow study

Wednesday's Judiciary Committee hearing was a milestone for a movement that has fought to raise awareness about these kinds of policies in schools around the country. The issue sits squarely at the intersection of race, educational equity and criminal justice. The committee heard testimony from Obama administration officials, a former Chicago Public Schools student, reform advocates and criminal justice leaders who sought to answer some basic questions: What good has the rise of zero-tolerance school discipline policies, now responsible for three million suspensions a year, done for the students they were supposed to protect? And just as pressing: What justifiable explanations are there for the deep disparities that zero-tolerance school discipline so reliably produces?

I'm so glad Kara posted her link already because this is a great follow-up to it. If you are interested in learning more about the kids in "Shame of the Nation", here is an interview with Kozol talking about the impact of poverty on schools and his new book "Fire in the Ashes".

We like to believe all students have an equal opportunity to learn regardless of the color of their skin or the amount of money their families have. However, a new report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education details just how far from that ideal the education available to students from differing backgrounds in New York City actually is.

"Only about half the US population have ancestry arrived to the country before the Civil War, and less then 20% of the 2000 population can be attributed to colonists arrived before the US independence" (p. 1632).

I agree that it is an extremely important factor in curriculum. The article mentions that major factors for predicting adult success are intelligence, family's socioeconomic status and self-control. Given the difficulty in changing the former two, and the demonstrated potential to alter self-control, it seems necessary that this be a major component of elementary school curriculum and continue to be taught in middle and high school. Self control seems particularly important in high school when individuals are faced with more freedoms and especially more dangerous freedoms, such as choosing experimentation with drugs and alcohol over staying in to study. One potential issue I do see in teaching self-control effectively (as mentioned in the three curriculum article) is the problem of creating reward junkie. It seems like many of the benefits to be reaped from self-control are not as immediate as children may like to see, and so reward systems may be harder to implement given the lack of immediate reinforcement. But if an method could be found, it seems like reward systems could be beneficial. Despite the risk of becoming reward junkies, reward systems can be very effective with teaching behavioral type actions.

While teaching self-control is important to learn at a young age i believe this is the parents job. If parents do not reinforce this behavior at home the teachers' efforts would be useless. Teachers are teaching theory in the classroom and parents are living practice outside the home.

I agree completely with the above statement that such teaching is the parents' job. In my opinion, parents across the board are letting not only their own kids down, but their kids' classmates as well by not doing their parenting jobs effectively at home.

This is an interesting connection: today's education budget cuts directly impact the viability of our future economy. So much for racing to the top...

This is a very well written column by Mr. Krugman. Unfortunately I feel he is correct that if our country does not switch its current path we will soon be going the way of Texas. For years the education system has been neglected and now we are starting to pay the price for it. An almost 40% non graduation rate is completely unacceptable for one of the wealthiest nations in the world and unless we stand up to this assault on our basic human rights we will have nobody to blame but ourselves.

I was initially attracted to this post because I have several friends who live in Texas. After reading through it, I started thinking about the whole budget cut thing and I realized I'll never know exactly what that means until I'm a teacher and being directly affected by it. I can ready all I want about numbers but I really won't know how big of a difference it is until I'm a part of it. On top of that, I won't have much of an argument against budget cuts to teachers unless I know exactly why cuts are coming from teachers and not somewhere else. Anyways, just a thought that came up. Maybe I should start paying attention to these details so I can be well-informed of the history of teachers salary and budget cuts if I become a teacher?

An academic version of the impact of poverty on schools - good source for your PROBE papers!

I'm probably going to use this! Thanks.

This is one of Jessica Ross' sources, and I think it's really an interesting connection to the idea of school as a game and the possibility of creating reward junkies vs. the benefits of instant feedback. Here's the quote she liked from it: "Clearly,verbally identifying misbehaving students by name, publicly stating specific transgressions, and the provision of team debits on a blackboard may have acted as a discriminative stimulus for appropriate conduct (Salend, Reynolds, & Coyle, 1989) and provided a source of immediate feedback."

The video of the kids in this marshmallow study is priceless.

This is crazy research. I don't even have much else to say. I do agree though. I think self-discipline is important. But I almost think balance is more important. I think it's OK to indulge occasionally. We need to learn discretion and discernment to know when to indulge and when to be disciplined.

Can we use video games as an example for improving education?

I particularly enjoyed this quote: "We define accountability around teachers failing to teach children." A lot has been said in class about the failure of standardized testing to really hold teachers accountable to giving a well-rounded education, but that quote says it succinctly. In terms of video games and the education system, I think the author has come up with a really amazing (although not totally new) concept. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone complain about how utterly unnecessary tests are, I'd be a very wealthy person. But comparing it to a video game gives this idea a lot of legitimacy. I've played video games. I may not have every level memorized, but I have the basic skills needed to play the game. This is (sadly) not true of many of the things I've learned in school. I have the BASIC skills needed for mathematics, but once calculus is in conversation, I'm done. I've taken the course, but because I had no vested interest in the class, I did what most students end up doing--master the information for a short amount of time, regurgitate it, then forget it in order to clear my mind for memorizing the next lot of (to me) useless information. If schools could take a more fundamentally hands-on approach to education (like video games), I think we'd see a lot more genuine mastery of material for long-term use. Plus... I bet we'd also combat the problem of truancy!

The idea that parents are willing to sacrifice anything for their children is not a new concept. Although this mother may have gone about trying to get her children a better education in the wrong way she had the best of intentions. I think the real crime is that this mother was forced into breaking the law in order to provide her children with a good education. The inconsistency and inequality of our education system is the real crime here.

Having lived just outside of Tallahassee for 20 years and also living in an area with sub-par standards in education, I can honestly say that I have known people who have committed this federal offense. Perhaps that calls into question my bias, but I believe that concurrent five-year prison sentences is unacceptable(as seen by the outcome). It almost seems that the judge was attempting to make an example of the offender, but regardless the law is the law. That means that the real question is why was she forced to send her children to another school? I think it would be important for the district of the school that the defendant lived in to start a series of reviews to see if they can possibly improve their educational system. Books, facilities, food, and teachers are all relevant to the equation of school improvement. That is the lesson we have been drawing from the entire course and I think that cases like this where people are willing to risk felonies in order to give their child a better education reinforce the idea that the school districts need to constantly review themselves.

I find the fact that this woman's actions are considered criminal to be deplorable. But, at the same time I can understand why the current structure would fail if everyone took their kids and put them where they wished. The answer, in my eyes, is far from criminalizing these actions. We should closer analyze the motivations of these actions with an aim to create a system that reduces the need for this behavior. Perhaps we need to broker a contract between the state and local governments so that school funding is not so drastically unequal from district to district.

"While the general trend in middle school mathematics performance was upward over the period of the project, students of teachers randomly assigned to the treatment group (eligible for bonuses) did not outperform students whose teachers were assigned to the control group (not eligible for bonuses)." So much for the argument that paying teachers more is enough to raise their kids' test scores!

I like this article, it has a lot of good points. I think the main reasons it points out are very true and it is sad that there are so many negative outlooks on male teachers.

I thought this article was really interesting especially the comment the author makes when she says..."There is an idea that elementary school is not academically rigorous, but that high school is. The older the kids, the more "acceptable" male teachers are." I think this is pretty ridiculous and pretty degrading towards the women that do teach in elementary schools. The first years of a child's education are the most vital because they learn "how to learn" and they will use those habits for the rest of their lives. To say that this is not an honorable profession would be unfair and ignorant.

It can be said the same for ANY predominately female oriented occupation (i.e. nursing, childcare, etc). The social stigma of being a man in these professions persists (though to a lessening degree in nursing) in being involved with children because of the assumed nurturing aspect that women a deemed naturally inclined and a lacking sense of trust and security for a child's well being when left in the care of a man.

Here's the original article on which the previous blog post was based.

While reading this article, i found myself agreeing with almost all of what Krashen was saying. Poverty does effect student learning. Fortunately for me, i never had to experience going to school hungry or sick. I always had books available to me in my school library and a school nurse present in case anyone got sick. I cannot imagine what it feels like to go to school without these basic things, nor do i want 25% of american children to go either. It's no wonder that students who live in poverty do worse in school. What is even more heart wrenchings is the fact that our government only cares of how well its country does internationally. What the government doesn't realize is that if it helps to reduce poverty, our children will be able to learn more efficiently and then it can get the international ranking it wants so badly. Until our government starts caring about our hungry children that go to school and not how the United States ranks internationally in education, then we cannot improve.