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Troy Patterson

Waiting for a School Miracle - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...01ravitch.html

msm msm168

shared by Troy Patterson on 02 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Troy Patterson on 02 Jun 11
     
    To prove that poverty doesn't matter, political leaders point to schools that have achieved stunning results in only a few years despite the poverty around them. But the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny. Usually, they are the result of statistical legerdemain.
Troy Patterson

Public schools aren't failing | CharlotteObserver.com - 0 views

www.charlotteobserver.com/...lic-schools-arent-failing.html

msm299

shared by Troy Patterson on 08 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • In fact, both show that American public school children are doing remarkably well.
  • For example, the NCES report shows that in schools with less than 25 percent poverty rates, American children scored higher in reading than any other children in the world. In. The. World.
  • The takeaway is simple. Our middle-class and wealthy public school children are thriving. Poor children are struggling, not because their schools are failing but because they come to school with all the well-documented handicaps that poverty imposes – poor prenatal care, developmental delays, hunger, illness, homelessness, emotional and mental illnesses, and so on.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • public school children outscored their private school counterparts, and nationally, charters are outperformed by traditional schools the majority of the time.
  • “the charter school movement [is] quickly becoming a backdoor for corporate profit.”
  • research is clear that money spent addressing the issues of child poverty are the most effective way to move test scores up
  • “Nobody understands the challenges and shortcomings of American schools better than the people who have dedicated their lives to them.” Yet educators are rarely asked for their expertise.
  • If policy makers were to listen to educators – and to students and parents – they would hear that the real crisis in public education is the loss of our collective commitment to the common good.
Troy Patterson

What poor children need in school - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-poor-children-need-in-school

msm259

shared by Troy Patterson on 19 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Most educational policy elites, whether in government or in the nonprofit sector, mean well.
  • Yet policymakers tend to come from a relatively privileged slice of American society.  And they tend to possess a set of beliefs and assumptions distinct to their background. 
  • But in most cases, the fact that decision-makers inhabit a different world from students—and particularly, poor students—is a matter of great significance.
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  • Poverty limits opportunity in all senses.  It restricts career paths, as policymakers recognize.  But it also denies young people equal time, resources, and exposure to discover their interests and foster their passions.  It constrains lives.
  • Schools, of course, did not create this problem.  But they do exacerbate it.  Over the past decade, well-intended policymakers concerned with closing the achievement gap have promoted policies and practices that reduce learning to something easily quantified.
  • Reformers need to understand that their narrow efforts to close the quantifiable “achievement gap” are creating another kind of educational inequity.  In other words, as they seek to close one gap they are opening up another.
  • Concerned only with the cultivation of ostensibly job-oriented knowledge and skills, they have neglected everything else that makes schools great. 
  • Our best schools are places where children gain confidence in themselves, build healthy relationships, and develop values congruent with their own self-interest.  They are places of play and laughter and discovery.
  • For contemporary education reformers, improving test scores is the only measure of school quality that matters.  And they have had some modest successes in this regard.  Yet they have merely reshuffled the deck. 
Troy Patterson

Poor kids who do everything right don't do better than rich kids who do everything wron... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...h-kids-who-do-everything-wrong

msm287 poverty

shared by Troy Patterson on 19 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • America is the land of opportunity, just for some more than others.
  • it's not just a matter of dollars and cents. It's also a matter of letters and words. Affluent parents talk to their kids three more hours a week on average than poor parents, which is critical during a child's formative early years.
  • Even poor kids who do everything right don't do much better than rich kids who do everything wrong. Advantages and disadvantages, in other words, tend to perpetuate themselves.
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  • Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively.
  • It's an extreme example of what economists call "opportunity hoarding."
  • It's not quite a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose game where rich kids get better educations, yet still get ahead even if they don't—but it's close enough.
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