Great in theory. In practice, it goes more like this:
White teacher identifies a problem with his/her students who aren’t reading at the appropriate level. Most of these “problem” students are not from white, middle-class backgrounds. Legal action, as described in the OP, smacks the teacher down. Teacher, who wants to do the right thing but can’t afford to put his/her career in jeopardy by involving school system in litigation, takes path of least resistance and engages in “social promotion.”
I’m not sure who to point the finger at, but if all parents took a much greater involvement in their kids’ education, the problem would be much less.
Krokodil, what legal action would prevent a white teacher from reaching out to black students? How would that happen? The lawsuit in question isn’t to prevent teachers from reaching out, it’s against the state of Florida for these deficient schools. I just don’t follow your argument here.
My mom taught me to read, but then she was a teacher. Does that count? By the time I started kindergarten, I was reading at the 3rd-grade level. Mom actually stopped tutoring me in reading at home because she was afraid that my reading level was well beyond my speaking level.
However, reading was emphasized very strongly in my primary school system. Almost every class period involved kids reading aloud, and there were special small-group reading workshop sessions both for kids having trouble and for gifted kids. Plus every day began with a journal-writing session and ended with a half-hour Sustained Silent Reading period, when we could read whatever we wanted as long as we were reading something. I think it was a pretty darn good system. Every classroom had a shelf full of random books, supplemented by the library downstairs.
It blows my mind how many books are thrown away in this country, or “culled” by public libraries, when there are grade schools without books. What is wrong with this country? Reading ain’t rocket science!
I took a little time to look up the actual tests. There are sample tests at the Florida Education site. In the sample there are two stories. The first, “Peter, Peaches, and the Porch Swing”, is a simple story about a young boy and his next door neighbor. In the accompanying drawings both main characters appear to be black, although it’s (intentionally?) ambiguous. The second story is a narrative about Stingrays similar to what a child might find in a science text. Neither story is particularly difficult, although the second could be challenging for some students (my opinion, obviously).
I don’t see how either could be judged to be racially biased, although if I were the NAACP lawyer I might attempt to indicate that the second story is about a subject of which most inner-city children would be unfamiliar.
I still fail to see why growing up in Western culture would have much to do with understanding physics with Western culture examples. As long as you know what a gun, cannon, pulley and spring are, it seems you would be able to do the problem if you understood the math. I didn't grow up in Australia, but I know what a boomerang is and don't think I would be at a disadvantage in figuring out, for example, a physics problem that involved a boomerang. In fact, I would think that your Ethiopan friends answer, in my mind, is counterintuitive based on the fact that most of qunatum mechanics, at least to my knowedge, involves particles that you can't really see, tatse, feel, etc., so is it that working with numbers involving these somewhat mysterious particles is somehow easier that working with numbers involving Western objects he has never seen or used? I can't say he is wrong in his opinion because that is how he feels, but I am not really following the logic.
Further, pulleys and springs, I would think, are fairly universal (or at least international) "machines." Again, I don't recall the last time I actually used a pulley, but I understand the concept of it.
Sorry for the double post..
I am not sure if you are just trying to play devil's advocate or actually believe what you wrote, but the whole point of reading is to learn about things you don't know about. Its not really interpreting or assimilating new information if its information you already know, so the passages in the tests SHOULD be about things the kids don't know about. That seems to me to be the basis of how you would separate whether they actually understood some new information in the passage or whether they are just answering based on previously accumulated knowledge. And if the test is given to and compared between kids that live in the same area, they ought to have similiar familiarity with things like starfish.
I’m basing my opinion on an article from last April’s Washington Post Magazine (I cite the reprint from the Seattle Times, because I don’t want to pay for the Post archive: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/134675100_teachers14.html ). The article describes a situation in Washington, DC, not Florida, but I suspect the basic behaviors transfer over.
The thrust of the article is that idealistic white teachers meet instant resentment by poor, nonwhite parents who see the teachers as swaggering know-it-alls, which torpedos the efforts of the teachers in question and shortchanges the children. I suspect this causes a lot of the “deficient schools” you mention. Here’s a quote from the article:
That sounds like a monster parent, Krokodil, and sadly, I’m sure every teacher meets a few over the years. Perhaps that woman is one of the worst. But anyway, I think it’s hard to prove that this is the problem. For one, I have no idea if most of the teachers in Florida at these schools are white or black. If they’re mostly black, then this Dead Poets Society-style idealistic white teacher being shunned is probably not the problem. The quote above says that “Mr. Kaplowitz was in a group of the first white teachers to come to the school in many years,” which indicates most of his colleagues were, and have been, black. So unless you want to submit the idea that all of the black teachers at these DC schools are incompetent, race shouldn’t be the problem there.
I can see this being a problem, for sure. Parents need to trust teachers. I just need more convincing that this is THE problem. It just involves too much generalizing for me: you’re suggesting the good teachers are usually white, the bad teachers, parents, and students are generally black or minorities, etc.
Just thinking aloud - you know, I’m about to enter my senior year of college, and I’ve only had one black teacher, ever. Seventh grade health. (Weird woman, too. :p) There was one black teacher at my high school, but I was never in the band, so I didn’t have her. My college is more racially diverse than my hometown, since it couldn’t possibly be less, but there you go. I’ve had a few Asian teachers (two or three, and one of them was for Japanese), and one who was part Mexican-Indian.
Whatever his opinion is on the matter, it was transmitted to me through a third party (the professor in whom he confided his discomfort with the pre-quantum courses), so I’m even less qualified to explain his position than I would be if he had told me directly.
My guess would be that his opinions were informed by the pervasive liberal attitudes that are popular on campus. Despite the fact that his pre-college education in Ethiopia was in large part made possible by the efforts of westerners, the prevailing opinion on campus stigmatized any deviation from the belief that western imperialism had only negative effects. Thus the tools of western cultures were seen as unwitting partners in a crime against humanity, and using them as examples to illustrate physics phenomena was tantamount to legitimizing western imperialism. A less provocative argument that draws the same conclusion would be that by ignoring the technologies of the less-developed world when constructing physics examples, the textbook author can be seen as a disbeliever in cultural relativism, and hence a relic of the unenlightened age when western imperialism was accepted and encouraged among educated westerners. Such antiquated ideas, so the argument goes, must be eradicated at the source; the materials by which the next generation is educated must be purged of all intimations that any one culture can be uniquely privileged over all others, in this case with regard to the discovery of scientific facts.
Quantum mechanics does not suffer quite as much in this deconstructionist argument, for two reasons. First, the development of quantum mechanics occurred after imperialism had already started to lose its appeal, so it can be classified with modern enlightened thought more easily than 17th – 19th century classical mechanics, electrodynamics, and thermal physics. Second, the objects that are the purview of quantum mechanics are, as you said, “particles that you can’t really see, taste, feel, etc.” This level of obscurity makes the subject seem more removed from the everyday affairs of life, which in turn makes difficult the identification of quantum mechanics with a peculiarly western worldview. Unable to be tied to a western conception of the world, quantum mechanics becomes immune to the criticism leveled against the standard textbook presentation of classical mechanics, electrodynamics, or thermal physics.
I’m curious where in Ontario this is taking place, since in most of Ontario there’s no “French school board.” There are certainly French schools, but some are public, some separate. It’s usually Catholic and public anywhere I’ve gone - and most kids in the Catholic boards are Anglophones.
Your explanation actually makes more sense than his does.
In teaching classical physics, though, I don't see how you can completely separate the technology of society from the problems that are presented. In fact, it would seem backwards to do so since the ultimate point of learning physics, in most cases, at least in college, is to eventually be able to apply those skills to real life situatuions. In that regard, it would seem best to be taught with examples of problems or objects seen in the society you live.
“My explanation” is just an educated guess at how to elaborate on the admittedly terse description that I gave of my Ethiopian friend’s opinion. One could consider this elaboration analogous to analytic continuation of functions in the complex plane. My elaboration and my Ethiopian friend’s opinion share the same essence, but the latter was not sufficiently detailed to make sense on its own.
I agree that it is backwards to cater to the whims of a political movement when deciding how best to educate the nation’s youth. Yet this accommodation is exceedingly common in higher education today. For a description of this phenomenon, I recommend Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind (profoundly insightful and uncannily on the mark, despite having been published over 15 years ago), or even Dinesh D’Souza’s book Illiberal Education: the Politics of Race and Sex on Campus.
The race of the students (and their parents) already is a factor, as of the OP:
Some blame the schools; I blame the parents, calling in the NAACP instead of making their kids study.
As for the race of the teachers, it’s probably less of a factor; the example I cited caused quite a stir here in the DC area when the Post ran it as a cover story to their Sunday magazine, but it showed a pattern that seems to come up again and again: Idealistic young teachers (of whatever race) enter the profession with a plan to benefit underprivileged children. The children’s parents, entrenched in an ethic of poverty and entitlement (Think of Lynn Thigpen’s character in Stand By Me), oppose the teachers at every step. Teachers becomes beaten-down hacks. Problem perpetuates.