Jean Anyon's What "Counts" as Educational Policy? Notes toward a New Paradigm serves as a neat bookend to the main foci of this course: socioeconomic systems, the students marginalized by these systems, how to best improve the educational and vocational outcomes of these students, families, and communities. Beginning with a critical look at historical attempts to improve urban educational outcomes, Anyon ties the almost century-long list of inadequate educational policies to ineffective macropolicies that ultimately failed to address the root cause of low achievement in urban schools, poverty.
What is interesting is the persistent relationship public k-12 education shares with the private business sector in regards to the demand on curricula creation. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, the Gary Plan, and A Nation at Risk all express concern for public education's ability to prepare students for employment (based on socioeconomic status, of course).(67-68) Indeed, the Gary Plan significantly business driven, influenced just as strongly by the scientific management movement as it was by Dewey. Scientific management was an early 20th century movement designed to increase efficiency in manufacturing through the increased separation of worker roles and duties, and incentivized wages.(Theide, 2013) These policies continue to trouble me. It is clear that education is a requirement to employment, yet the idea of educational policies tailored to the economic demands for human capital strike me as an obscene context for improvement. The relationship between business and education appears to benefit businesses more than the people in the communties served by schools. As we also learned in last week's readings(Buras, Spring), Anyon discusses the attempts at the privatization of public schools under the guise of school choice, through the implimentation of charter schools and vouchers.(68) However, school improvement projects resulting from federal and state mandates still struggle to provide the intended outcome. And that's because you can throw money at a problem and hope to solve it, you have to actually address the circumstances that created and foster the problem. Yet a number of factors must be addressed in order to create a viable solution with long-term success. The concentration of poverty in urban areas was compounded by white flight to the suburbs in the Post-War era, and reinforced by redlining of real estate. Inadequate public transportation fails potential employees from finding employment at the businesses that also migrated to the suburbs. Finally, zoning laws and NIMBYism prevents the construction of low-income, affordable housing that urban families might move to. And so at the publication of this article, the percentage of people living in poverty are close to the highest historical amount ever, "before massive urban poverty became a national issue."(72-73). Which is not to say that massive urban poverty didn't exist before then, it absolutely did. It just wasn't considered a pressing concern.
Socioeconomic Gradients Predict Individual Differences in Neurocognitive Abilities
Anyon provides ample evidence of longitudinal data from numerous research studies that essentially suggest the same thing: equitable resources would improve the lives of students and families living in poverty. This is critical, because poverty has deleterious effects on the neurocognitive development of the brain, especially during childhood. Poverty robs people of their potential. To take it a step further, the gatekeeping of effective educationthrough spatial politics and socioeconomic status robs humanity of potential. NPR addressed the issue of education and place in it's recent Hidden Brain podcast Zipcode Destiny-The Persistent Power of Place and Education. According to Lee and Burkham (2002), disadvantaged children not only enter kindergrten with significantly lower cognitive skills compared to advantaged peers, but also enter lower quality school systems. (76) Should families receive support to move as they sought to access higher quality public education, their children were disproportionately placed into special education classrooms, a problem discussed in Leonardo and Broderick.(2011)
So we can can see that social inequalities are continually being reinforced by the systems meant to foster economic prosperity. What can be done?Anyon offers an approach that I consider to be reminiscent of Boggs (2011), by addressing the needs of the community. Evidence of several long-term research studies indicate that addressing the needs of the student and their family in a holistic manner through access to wraparound social services, childcare, coaching, and supplemental income greatly improved the educational, financial, and mental health outcomes of the participating families. Mothers reported lower rates of depression and stress, students had fewer behavioral difficulties, and higher levels of achievement on standardized testing. Anyon argues that public policies committed to the development of economic opportunities in urban areas combined with access to comprehensive social services will organically result in tangible improvements in the education outcomes of students in urban educational districts, and offers substantial evidence in support of their argument. The government has historically thrown money at plenty of failed educational policies that addressed the symptoms of poverty, perhaps it's time it funds a series of policies shown to have successful outcomes. Works Cited
3.“Socioeconomic Gradients Predict Individual Differences in Neurocognitive Abilities,” by Kimberly G. Noble et al., in Developmental Science, Vol. 10, No. 4; July 2007. Credit: Amanda Montañez
Chapter 8 of American Education by Joel Spring, titled “Local Control, Choice, Charter Schools, and Homeschooling,” asks deeply important questions regarding the control and dissemination of education in American society,addresses the numerous stakeholders whose perspectives must be considered when creating curricula across the country, and includes the "goal" of "developing human capital to ensure the United States remains competitive in the global economy," (219) a concept I been struggling with since I entered the education program and work with primarily first-generation college students. In it's focus on charter schools, this chapter also provides a top-notch, diplomatic outline of all the reasons I don't support charter schools. Yo, this chapter has everthing: Race, class, gender, religion, spatial concerns, they're in here! It should come as no surprise to my classmates that I am vehemently against charter schools, which I consider an extension of conservative attempts to control the morality of future citizens, break unions, commodify, and corporatize education.
Deeply influenced by free-market economist Milton Friedman, conservatives have turned to using the language of "school choice" as they fund parochial, private, and charter school options to eliminate monopoly public schools held on education. Free-market supporters argue that schools are like any other product in a marketplace, and competition will creat improvement through competition. I disagree, in that I believe that education is a public good, and should not commodified, nor subject to the whims of the market. (This is the part where I disclose that I'm fully #TeamKeynes.)The 2016 Republican platform called for school choice and financing for home schooling, private/parochial schools, charter, magnet, and online schools, career technical education and early-college high schools.
However it is important to consider whether these options provide union support or professional development, and whether they are non-profit or for-profit companies. What is the target student demographic? What are the enrollment requirements, or student code of behavior? And since taxes follow students to their schools, who will be left behind in the public schools? Will these school choice alternatives essentially defund public schools, leaving behind poor student who lost the enrollment lottery, students with behavioral issues, and the special education population? Following No Child Left Behind, the Unsafe Schools Options allowed parents to transfer students to a different school, with the caveat that the transfer school may not be a failing school. For families living in failing districts, this reduces their options drastically. If the only option becomes enrollment in charter schools, it reads like the government is directly targeting poverty-stricken school districts unable to provide support services for lack of funding and aligning themselves with corporate ed groups, to the detriment of public education.
School choice vouchers for parochial schools leads to the question of whether the government should fund religious education, which I also oppose. Many parents are concerned about the religio-moral education of their children, but that's literally the responsibility of the parents and their church. Removing dollars from public schools to fund private, religious education is incredibly problematic. Not the least because it silos the student from learning about the potential plurality of diversity in their surroundings. Although the Supreme Court allowed that Ohio Project (1983) did not infringe any amendments in that the basis of the law was secular, and avoided "entanglement" between government and religion. The fact that the majority of vouchers went to parochial schools because there were no public options available to urban parents reminds us of the segregation and gatekeeping measures in place by suburban schools to provide an academic and professional edge to suburban students to the detriment of their urban neighbors.
The injection of neo-liberal capitalism economics into public goods such as public education has resulted in a muddy mess of American capitalism, class advantage, segregation, and religion that ultimately only benefits corporate stakeholders, politicians, and families with enough capital to provide a rigorous education to their children, and only serves to further widen the inequality gap in the United States.
We had some truly great reading this week that have incorporated some great concepts within them. In Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers, Villegas and Lucas declare that "teacher
educators must first articulate a vision of teaching and learning within the
diverse society we have become...then
use that vision to systematically guide the infusion of multi-cultural issues
throughout the teacher education curriculum" to move beyond the current fragmentary method of addressing student diversity as a strength. To achieve this goal, Villegas and Lucas offer what they call a "Curriculum Proposal for Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers," predicated on six separate strands designed to be interwoven into a comprehensive teacher education (Villegas & Lucas, 2002, p21). These strands include sociocultural consciousness, an affirmative attitude toward students from culturally diverse backgrounds, commitment and skills to act as agents of change, constructivist views of learning, learning about students, and culturally responsive teaching practices. I enjoyed reading this article, recognizing similarities to how I approach student support services for a diverse student populations in higher education as a graduate assistant. The program I work with was created by and is primarily staffed with social workers and graduate students working on their Masters in Social Work. Almost all of the strands Villegas and Lucas have similar counterparts in social work and echo the National Association of Social Worker's Code of Ethics, most especially sociocultural consciousness, the commitment to act as agents of change, and affirmative attitudes towards students from culturally diverse backgrounds. Similarly, Dr. Shawn Ginwright's article discussing the unintended effects of trauma-informed education is also steeped in a very social-work informed background. "The term “trauma informed care” didn’t encompass the totality of his experience and focused only on his harm, injury and trauma." This sentence perfectly encapsulates the potential negative outcome of a methodology intended to support and promote resiliency but instead reduces an individual to their trauma. Ginwright points out the value of a more holistic approach to working with students who have experienced trauma at both an individual and collective level, stating the importance of the healing centered approach. The example questions of "What's happened to you?" vs "What's right with you?" could easily be questions that any social worker with a focus on healing could (and probably would) use with a client. Healing centered engagement is inherently political, much like education and social work. Healing, like many aspects of social work, highlights the intersectional nature of identity and offers an opportunity at collective healing, embracing race, class, gender, culture, age, etc., whereas trauma-informed education is focused primarily on the individual. The two previous articles complimented each other very well, and provide a good background to the final article, Community as Text: Using the Community as a Resource for Learning in Community Schools (Blank, Johnson, Shah, 2003). This article again recalls the grand concepts of Grace Boggs for schools to be inextricably tied to the communities in which they are based, and provides several methods to successfully integrate community learning into the school curriculum, while engaging culturally diverse groups of students. The success of the students in these community schools is in part due to the engagement of teachers who were culturally responsive to their students. Likewise, the community schools offered complement of health and social services for the students, providing holistic student support as opposed to only offering academic services. And as with the healing centered appoach, the collective engagement between educators, families, and students fostered a true sense of collaboration and community.
Works Cited
Villegas, A. M., & Lucas, T. (2002). Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers: Rethinking the Curriculum. Journal of Teacher Education,53(20), 20-32. doi:10.1177/0022487102053001003 Ginwright, S. (2018). The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@ginwright/the-future-of-healing-shifting-from-trauma-informed-care-to-healing-centered-engagement-634f557ce69c Blank, M. J., Johnson, S. D., & Shah, B. P. (2003). Community as text: Using the community as a resource for learning in community schools. New Directions For Youth Development, 97,107-120.
