Reply to This American Life about desegregation in schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I got to about page 9 of this thread, and had to stop reading, because it was so depressing. But one thing occurred to me that I wanted to say.

It is toxic, this attitude we seem to have acquired that the road to success has to involve "being the best." "Rising to the top." Like success is some zero sum game, where your child must walk over the lazy, entitled corpses of other, lesser children, in order to... what, get an MBA? Go to med school? An ivy league college (but only if they get a "practical" degree)? This is depressing.

I don't care if my kids are "the best." I want them to learn to enjoy learning. And that is all. [/quote]

Yes, I agree with you for my own children but somehow I forget this when I think about disadvantaged children (they I start thinking about education a tool to a better life, an approach I typically disparage).  Love of  learning and curiosity and rich understanding of the world is what I value for my own kids and what I should thus also value for other kids.  Disadvantaged kids  likely aren't getting this at KIPP any more than at Noyes.

Here's a story my mom taught middle school social studies at a poor black rural and had a whole unit she created on the holocaust.  She said the students would sit and listen in complete engrossed silence when she read them Number the Stars. She said you could hear a pin drop in the classroom. But the students were failing their state tests, so the teachers were handed a test prep curriculum that had every day and every lesson spelled out (now my mom exaggerates, so I don't know if it was that bad, but reading them Number the stars and her whole Holocaust lesson was out).  So she left the classroom to be a school librarian.  I understand students were failing before, but it seems like a focus on education as a tool and tests scores as a measure of how well you are grasping the tool isn't helping.  [/quote]

Number the Stars has a reading level of around 3rd grade in terms of complexity and word variety.  I get that the topic is more sophisticated but the it is an excellent example of the rigor challenge a lot of these kids face.  They need the complexity your mom was bringing, but they also need the more complex vocabulary building texts.  The tests are like telling a fat kid loose weight, go the McDonalds across the street and get a salad.  They tell us we have a problem but they don't get us any solution.  Richer content, earlier is key, but that lesson needed to be a lot earlier. [/quote]

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