Losing Heart

In all honesty, I haven't gotten very far in the book. I tried to find it in stores and then ordered it off Amazon, but with the holiday and working all weekend, time has been limited.

My first impression of the book is that it fits in really well with our class discussions. I also really enjoyed the quotes listed on the page across from the Contents. One of my favorites is from Marcel Proust: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." What a really great way of looking not only at life, but also relating it to the concept of education.

I'm excited to read more and discuss the different concepts- education vs. schooling and the idea of educating for peace...

Kozol's Savage Inequalities

Three things strike me about my initial reading in Savage Inequalities:

• Economic inequalities are vast in the United States.
• These inequalities dramatically affect the quality and types of education that our children receive.
  
• Listening to children's needs and desires takes concentration and focus.

We must take time to listen to children and build a system that responds to their total needs!

Naming a Crisis- Losing Heart Ch 1-2

As we've discussed for much of this semester, the majority of policy debates around public education today tend to focus on schools as instruments of the economy--instruments not completely separate from many other raw materials-processing plants: Just as we need a mill to turn a forest into different piles of lumber, we need schools to turn children into future workers (or in the more developed and cynical view, future mill workers, managers and owners). Framing the question in this manner lends itself to certain questions depending on whether we focus on the student (Is every child being given an equal opportunity to compete and succeed in the job market?) or the system as a whole ("How will our school system ensure that the United States can compete and succeed on a Global Economic level?)

At this point, we've spent hours discussing the counter-productivity of endless test prep on its own terms, the cultural biases implicit in such testing, and the larger structural inequalities built into and exacerbated by the current public school system. For the most part, then, these discussions have revolved around basic structural and economic concerns, especially in the second half of this semester. However, one of our first readings still stands out for me: Ayers' conviction (Between Heaven and Earth) that we are always teaching for one thing and against something else. In spite of the eternal place in the realm of public debate reserved for the issue of prayer in public schools, the face is that today we have an education system primarily conceived of in economic terms. What moral lessons is this system teaching towards? What is it teaching against? Or, to re-appropriate Anyon's wording, what is the hidden moral curriculum of our schools?

H. Svi Shapiro's Losing Heart: The Moral and Spiritual Miseducation of America's Children sets out to address these questions. Decrying a recent narrowing of the public discourse around education, Sharpiro lays out a world where standardized test scores measure the intellectual health of our children the same as the Dow Jones measures the health of the economy (5). Such a unit of measure should give us pause when we consider the fact that this year's high school graduates were likely between eight and ten years old on 9/11. Children are coming of age in an increasingly precarious atmosphere, one which we are told is permeated by limitless danger and uncertainty, endless crisis and war.

In an environment of such fleeting security it seems fair to say that morality (however defined) becomes more important. And in such an environment, what can we come together to believe in? For Shapiro, the answer is a consumerism:

To grow up in America (and, we need to add, increasingly throughout the world) is to be socialized into a culture where nearly everything of significance derives from the values of the marketplace.... The market has become the primary source of meaning and value in our world. Consuming is, in a very real sense, our religion, and it is linked to the very definition of who we are and how we live. (25)

Cultural critics have long argued that consumer goods act on levels beyond their most immediate function or "use value": Whether we purchase a pair of shoes or a car, we are also buying a reflection of ourselves--our understanding of who we are and how we want to be seen by others. However, the accompanying economic need for constant innovation to drive consumer demands and sustain economic growth leads to a sense of permanent discomfort: of insecurity, ennui, and inadequacy in the face of an elusive "ultimate life" as portrayed in the media.

Of course, much of this is nothing new, nor are passages lamenting the backhanded advertising tactics or sheer number of commercials teens sit their developing minds through. Shapiro has a sharper focus, though. This shallow culture is for him another manifestation of the shallow moral emphasis of our school system. Shapiro wants public education to prepare children for the complicated moral world as much as the complicated economic world of the 21st century: it should

be about teaching young people to think and learn what it means to become critically minded human beings. This is the great legacy of enlightenment values: the belief that our humanity is deepened and enriched by the development of the capacity to go beyond the accepted dogma or the conventional assumptions of a culture.

Kozol's Savage Inequalites

I am reading Kozol's Savage Inequalites.  This book clearly explains to us why is there savage inequlites between the races.  Even though some people said that it is not only becasue of money differences, I thought it really related to the money.  Different school buildings and teachers came from how much money your parents made.  As Kozol states several examples of financial support per student in each different demographical area this clearly tells us that money is a really important fact for receiving better education.

The different amounts of money that is raised helps to raise students up differently based on what society desires for the future.  As Kozol insists in his book, "Where will we see the best return?, Who is likely to return the most to our society?"(Kozol, 1991, p117) are the questions that the society desires for the students who received education.

However, I also do not think that it is absolutely true that money is the answer to this problem.  I think about what the prinicipal of an elementary school in Riverdale said in the book, "The building and teachers are part of it, of course. But it isn't just the building and the teachers. Our kids come from good families and the nighborhood is good. ...Our typical sixth grader reads at an 8th grade level" (Kozol,1991, p98), is very good insight.

Honestly, I thought about Korea which was the one of the poorest countries after the Korean war in the 1950s.  There were different classes between people and these people produced poverty again since there was no way to receive a better education.  However, these people who lived under the worst conditions than the African American students that are described in this book.  Those people also began to sacrifice themselves in order to provide better education to their children.  Of course, the school and education that their children received were not that great, but the difference was the passion of their parents and children for the education and success.  In the end, there were many people who could overcome poverty and inequqlities in education. I mean these kind of things  happen in even American schools  that hardly find Asians students who have a hard time to succeed in their education.  It is not because their parents had everything and were in same position as white people.  However, I heard so many stories of Asian parents who worked hard and sacrificed so much for their children to be better in school.

Of course, I am not saying that the parents of African American parents and other races do not sacrifice and have no passion for their childern's education.  However, I think family culture is also very important for students to be sucessful in their education. So, the point is that we should help the parents of African American students and other races so they can really have a more passionate and suportive family culture.

This is SuYeon :)

Kozol - Shame of the Nation

As I am reading Shame of the Nation I can’t help but feel disheartened that the poor conditions and segregation in schools have been going on for YEARS and little has been done about it. What I find even more alarming is that I was completely unaware of the terrible conditions and the increasing segregation in schools before I started at NEIU this semester. In the book Kozol provides chilling statistics and personal stories from the children within the schools themselves. He goes into the troubled schools and gets to know the students so he can put a names to the statistics. As I am reading this book I can't help but wonder how we as a nation have allowed children to be sent to rat, asbestos, and lead paint infested schools for years? How have we created expensive stringent standardized testing in all schools and failed to fix the buildings themselves up? Not surprisingly the schools with the worst conditions are the ones that are occupied by minority students.

Kozol points out that in the two largest educational innovations in the past decade the issue of race has been ignored. Obviously, by ignoring this issue the problem is getting even worse and by allowing schools to become more and more segregated we are creating children who do not know anything outside of their own ethnic group. Kozol believes (and I agree) that the world would be much better if we knew each other. So many of our problems are caused because we have no knowledge of the other group. In addition, by allowing out schools to become segregated and letting the schools that primarily serve minority students fall apart we are sending the message to our minority students that they don't matter. Reading this book made me think of a discussion I had in a different class about the Brown decision. The clark doll test provided substantial proof that went on to help them win the case. In the doll test it showed how segregation impacted the mental status of school children. A similar study was performed earlier this year and unfortunately many of the children still felt that being white or lighter skinned was better. (To see videos of the children's answers and more info on the study go here: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/17/ac360-series-doll-study-research/)

Kozol shows in his book how the conditions of public schools have digressed to those in the 1960s. As Brian pointed out, some states and cities are working to improve the conditions and lesson the gap. Unfortunately, little improvement has been seen in Chicago and we are still one of the worst school districts in the nation.

Shame of the Nation

As we read earlier in the semester, Kozol likes to visit schools and talk to students, sit in their classrooms, and even eat lunch with them. From these conversations we get the emotional side of the argument, which is how poor and minority students in this country feel about all aspects of their school. You can tell by his style that he believes in empowerment, because he asks open-ended questions and seems to let them talk about whatever is on their minds, although his questions for teachers and principals are sometimes a little more direct. I think his reason for being direct is that we wants to plant the seed of, or expand on, questioning some of the decisions made in and instructional style of poor, segregated schools.

If the stories that come from his direct observations aren't enough to persuade or break your heart, he also provides a more scientific angle and careful analysis. One of the key points we should all be aware of is this: in the years of decreasing school segregation in this country, the achievement gap between students in wealthy and mostly white districts and those in poor, mostly minority districts narrowed. Starting in the early 90s, when schools started a trend back to segregation, the gap has been on the rise once again. The standardization and accountability movement has not made any lasting or significant gains in the gap. If Kozol had decided to go with a subtitle for this book, I think it should've been something about segregation, because I think very few realize the extent of it and the problems created by it. Because of how we think but don't talk about race in this country, perhaps he was afraid that fewer people would've picked up the book if it had had a controversial title.

Is there a better way? What would that look like? Examples can be seen in a few medium cities and in New Jersey. In Milwaukee, four-year-olds get a full year of all-day preschool, and 22 suburban districts participate in a city/suburbs transfer program that has been going for 30 years. Similar programs exist in St. Louis and Louisville (but are now in jeopardy due to funding issues and regressive thinking). Integration has shown significant benefits and far fewer problems than critics or fearful parents have predicted. New Jersey has free pre-K in low-income districts, providing the extra help where it is needed, and is one of just 14 progressive states that actually take poverty levels into account in determining district funding levels (I think the latter point came from my paper research and not Kozol; I'm going from memory on this one). Sadly, Illinois and New York are among the worst in the country in terms of the severity of segregation and regressive funding levels.

BOOK CHOICE

I will also be reading "Savage Inequalities" by Kozol. I actually just received it this morning and have been reading it since. So far, I have found that I am mostly angry with the sad realities of how public education, segregated education, has not changed much where it was in 1991. So far it looks like not much has changed in public education since the 1960's. The stories, so far, seem somewhat exaggerated, but I know they are not. My personal experience speaks to the disparity and the continual failure to educate America's poorest (almost always) minority children. I am enjoying Kozol and hope to finish the book in the next couple of days.