Help us end Big Test/Jeb Crow. We could create equity together by rebuilding the capacity you've helped bad people destroy. You may have to swallow some pride; but what's most important to you?
Great series Billy. I think that the quote from Nicole Hannah-Jones is a good one. But I think her own writing shows how difficult it is to live up to. In her narrative about choosing a school for her child, her child ends up and what appears to actually be a really good school. here's how she describes it:
"The school’s population was 91 percent black and Latino. Nine of 10 students met federal poverty standards. But what went on inside the school was unlike what goes on in most schools serving the city’s poorest children. This was in large part because of the efforts of a remarkable principal, Roberta Davenport. She grew up in Farragut, and her younger siblings attended P.S. 307. She became principal five decades later in 2003, to a low-performing school. Davenport commuted from Connecticut, but her car was usually the first one in the parking lot each morning, often because she worked so late into the night that, exhausted, she would sleep at a friend’s nearby instead of making the long drive home. Soft of voice but steely in character, she rejected the spare educational orthodoxy often reserved for poor black and brown children that strips away everything that makes school joyous in order to focus solely on improving test scores. These children from the projects learned Mandarin, took violin lessons and played chess. Thanks to her hard work, the school had recently received money from a federal magnet grant, which funded a science, engineering and technology program aimed at drawing middle-class children from outside its attendance zone."
So she does reject the advantage of going to an "elite" school, but she absolutely embraces the advantage of going to a "good" school. I sure find no fault in her for this choice, but it still leaves unresolved what solution is best for people whose zoned schools are absolute misery. This is the problem that the "reform" movement has tackled, badly, but I haven't seen many better ideas that have any public traction. If you made me king of the education system we would end up something radically different that looked a lot more like Finland than America, but in the political reality that we have today, advocating for such a radical reshaping strikes me as tilting at windmills.
Great series Billy. I think that the quote from Nicole Hannah-Jones is a good one. But I think her own writing shows how difficult it is to live up to. In her narrative about choosing a school for her child, her child ends up and what appears to actually be a really good school. here's how she describes it:
"The school’s population was 91 percent black and Latino. Nine of 10 students met federal poverty standards. But what went on inside the school was unlike what goes on in most schools serving the city’s poorest children. This was in large part because of the efforts of a remarkable principal, Roberta Davenport. She grew up in Farragut, and her younger siblings attended P.S. 307. She became principal five decades later in 2003, to a low-performing school. Davenport commuted from Connecticut, but her car was usually the first one in the parking lot each morning, often because she worked so late into the night that, exhausted, she would sleep at a friend’s nearby instead of making the long drive home. Soft of voice but steely in character, she rejected the spare educational orthodoxy often reserved for poor black and brown children that strips away everything that makes school joyous in order to focus solely on improving test scores. These children from the projects learned Mandarin, took violin lessons and played chess. Thanks to her hard work, the school had recently received money from a federal magnet grant, which funded a science, engineering and technology program aimed at drawing middle-class children from outside its attendance zone."
So she does reject the advantage of going to an "elite" school, but she absolutely embraces the advantage of going to a "good" school. I sure find no fault in her for this choice, but it still leaves unresolved what solution is best for people whose zoned schools are absolute misery. This is the problem that the "reform" movement has tackled, badly, but I haven't seen many better ideas that have any public traction. If you made me king of the education system we would end up something radically different that looked a lot more like Finland than America, but in the political reality that we have today, advocating for such a radical reshaping strikes me as tilting at windmills.