Is What's Fair to Some Fair to All?

In each of the readings this week, we explored the ineffectiveness of the  “sameness as fairness” educational approach and read about specific instances in which it simply did not work. Examples include holding all students to the same academic standards, presenting them with a “one-size-fits-all” curricular approach, and having the same learning expectations for all children, regardless of their culture, skills, and language abilities.

·      Gutierrez illustrated her point by taking us into California schools and examining ways in which literacy teaching methods for ELLs “ignore the repertoires of practice students bring to learning environments” (Gutierrez, 2007, pg. 111).

·      Purcell-Gates brought attention to the ways that the under-privileged and illiterate can be virtually dismissed from an educational environment and deemed “too ignorant” to be worthy of an education. 

·      Ladson-Billings discussed the ways in which under-performing children are often given “permission to fail” when teachers are unsure, unwilling, or unable to teach in a culturally responsive manner (Ladson-Billings, 2002, Kindle Edition)

·      Jackson and Cooper presented actual, concrete curricular approaches that have historically helped certain schools close the achievement gap. Their overall point was that, in order for any educational approach to work, it must be based on a Pedagogy of Confidence, or the idea that any and all students can learn (Jackson and Cooper, 2007, pg. 247).

From a political perspective, I believe that fairness in schooling is tremendously difficult to achieve, primarily because there are so many wildly differing viewpoints on what equates fairness. To the politician, “fairness” might mean whatever needs to be done to win re-election. This might include privatizing schools and implementing substandard curriculum that ultimately compromises a child’s education. However, if this means another few years in office and seeing that political allies are stroked, well, to the politician, what could be more fair than that? To the culturally responsive theorist, fairness might involve teaching children in ways that might be offensive to the gender responsive education theorist. Meanwhile, the ELL learning specialist might disagree with the “fairness” approach favored by both the gender and culturally responsive instructors.

I think that fairness begins with all individuals being allowed to compete on a level playing field. However, such a circumstance is all but impossible in the United States as long as individuals exist on such vastly different socio-economic levels. In such a climate, the middle and upper classes, or the “haves,” will always have a stronger voice, more power, and more influence than the lower classes, or the “have nots.”  

Fairness in schooling can only come when each and every school in the nation, public, private, parochial, and charter, is prepared to operate on a curriculum that is foundationally designed to formulate and hone the academic and social needs of children. It might be necessary for a highly effective and comprehensive standard curriculum to be developed and implemented at a national level, and the curriculum can then be finessed, adapted, and broadened as needed within each school. Theoretically, in this approach, not only would each child be given the opportunity to receive a standard, high quality education, more specific teaching theory, such as culturally responsive instruction, could be employed as needed. In order for true fairness in schooling to take place, it has to happen in more than a few schools in a few states. In order for the education arena to be truly “fair,” the fairness must be authentic, far-reaching, and, most of all, comprehensive.   

"Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?"---George Bush, 1/11/00

 From an academic standpoint, i.e. looking solely at the results of tracking and assessment in American schools, I agree with this statement. In my opinion, standardized test results are not always a good indication of what children know and the depth of their knowledge. However, that being said, I think that one real way of knowing if students are learning is to talk to them and actually observe what is happening in schools today.

During the spring semester of 2011, I observed in an alternative high school in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. Though my original goal was to generate curriculum for pregnant teens and teen parents based on what I observed (there is a high teen pregnancy rate among students at the school), my objective quickly changed once I actually got into the classroom at A.I.M (the name of the high school).

The classroom at A.I.M. consisted of one very large room filled with three long rows of computers. In fact, one might initially think that s/he is in the computer lab. Students are expected to come in each day for three hours (either from 8 to 11 or 12 to 3), sit in front of a computer, and work on an academic software program called PLATO. Aside from a person who was hired to help children with any math questions they might have, there is virtually no teaching instruction. The principal of the school and teacher’s assistant sit in the back of the room for the duration of the school day. At A.I.M. the computer serves as an instructor, and the PLATO program is not particularly engaging or informative. On any given day, a number of students are asleep at their desks or chatting with one another within minutes of arriving.

When I asked kids at A.I.M. what they felt about the academic format as it is now, the responses I got included “We’re not learning anything,” “This program is boring me to sleep,” “I miss having actual teachers,” and “Could you (Ms. Collins) please teach us so that we can learn from a real, live teacher?”

These kids were more than able to voice that they were not learning in school. Moreover, when I worked with many of them one on one, I found that they were retaining very little, if any knowledge, from one PLATO test answer to the next.

While A.I.M. is an alternative school, and, in theory, shouldn’t be an indication of a “norm,” I am sure there are many more schools like it in America. Furthermore, I know that the standards of learning at the umbrella high school of A.I.M. also does not teach students in the best manner possible. From this experience, I concluded that  getting into schools and observing classrooms is a way to gauge whether or not children are learning. In reference to some of the articles we’ve read during the course of the past few weeks, there are numerous indications that education is so often affected and manipulated for political purposes, many students suffer. For example, in “The Silenced Dialogue,” Lisa Delpit talks about the deep alienation that many faculty members of color feel when talking to white colleagues about the needs of minority students. More often than not, white colleagues are unwilling to listen to what their minority counterparts have to say if it goes against what they feel they already know. This form of dismissiveness and superiority---that is, a minority teacher being silenced when talking about the needs of minority students—is not an uncommon occurrence. Ultimately, ignoring the voice of multi-cultural faculty members ultimately affects how students are taught. Thus, the knowledge students receive is compromised.

Meanwhile, Lipman and Apple wrote about neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and in so doing, illustrated how incredibly political the educational arena has become. Both neoliberals and neoconservatives have entirely different views of what education should be, and both groups are on a continual quest to pass various policies, bills, and laws in an effort to realize a certain educational vision. Meanwhile, nothing seems to be really addressing the needs of children, and, in the end, many students in American schools are not learning much. Thus, looking at educational policy and how politics affect daily school life is another way of measuring the knowledge that students receive (or not).

It is hard to say where we should go from here, but in terms of my personal vision for American schools, I believe that the public school system should remain, but, in an ideal world, be completely reorganized and restructured to far better suit the needs of children. The American public school system should feature the following:

·      Equal access to education for all, regardless of race, class, gender, and socio-economic status

·      This quality of education should be free for all

·      A mutually agreed upon, high-quality, academic program for all

·      Equal quality of education and training for teachers

·      Trust in teachers from schools and parents

·      High standards set for all students

·      Special support should be provided for children who have difficulty with academics

·      There should be early recognition and prevention of learning problems when possible, i.e. a pro-active, rather than reactive approach should be employed

Finally, I believe that we can let go of teaching students for the sole purpose of doing well on standardized tests. Standardized tests should not be issued multiple times a year, and, ideally, should only be administered no more than twice in one academic calendar. Finally, I believe that NCLB, at least as it is currently structured, should be let go.

Soooo.....Where Do We Go From Here?!

“Certainly, attempts by a variety of stakeholders to effectively teacher-proof public school curricula have influenced contemporary notions on the work of a teacher, and the role of a teacher in knowledge sharing and production. An overly cynical view is that the work of an educator is so undervalued, so disempowered, that teaching has been reduced to another cog in the reproductive school-machine. Of course, your blog post can take up this view, but more needed, perhaps, are writings that re-vision and reimagine what it means to teach, now” (Tuck, discussion post, 2011)

Before I proceed any further with my blog post, I must admit something: to some degree, I am one of those individuals who regards the current state of American education with utter dismay and no small sense of despair. I have a few theories about why the state of American education is so dismal, and will discuss them here. I will then propose how the system might possibly be changed and reimagined.

To put it bluntly, one of the main reasons that the public school systems are failing is that, on the whole, education, teachers, and teaching is not something that is truly valued in this country. In America, teaching is work that is more or less considered “easy” and something that anyone can do. Moreover, my personal experience has been that so many Americans feel that since they’ve all been to school and all had teachers, they know how to teach. And yet, on its face, this line of reasoning makes no sense, and is the equivalent of someone thinking, “Hey, I’ve had surgery. That means that I know how to do it! Pass me that big scalpel.”

Programs like Teach for America, while excellent in a number of ways, hold college recruitment sessions in which representatives say, “Don’t know what you really want to do with your life? Why not teach for awhile?” Meanwhile, I’ve heard the statement, “Those who can’t, teach” uttered on more than one occasion.

In my own teaching experience, I’ve had parents express the view that teaching is easy and anyone can do it, along with the proclamation that they personally know all there is to know about the profession. I’ve had parents blatantly and unabashedly interrupt the schoolday by insisting on throwing their child a birthday party in my classroom and I’ve had parents barge into the school during the day with a new family pet so that all the children could see. All such invasions are nothing short of disrupting another person’s work, yet I would be given awfully short shrift if I did the same thing to the offending parents, i.e. “Excuse me, but I know all about law, and I don’t feel that you are arguing this case correctly.”

From a political standpoint, school budgets are always one of the first things on the chopping block and it is always the school systems that can least afford cuts that suffer the most. In New York City, thousands of teachers are losing their jobs, but programs like the New York City Teaching Fellowship and the New York City Teaching Residency are placing young, thoroughly untrained individuals in the classroom with very little guidance, paying them much less than what many of the laid-off teachers made, and expecting them to perform. Though there are many positive aspects to these programs, having unprepared individuals parachuted into a tough, urban school setting has the potential to be a demoralizing experience and has the potential to shortchange both the students as well as the teaching fellow.

Jonathan Kozol wrote his searing expose Savage Inequalities twenty-years ago and has been discussing the problems of “separate but unequal” education for years. Yet there are far too many school systems in this country that exhibit the same appalling conditions that Kozol presented in 1991. How can this be?

While other countries like Finland (which has been able to turn around what was once a poorly functioning system in a matter of decades and now boasts the world’s top rated education), Japan, Canada, and South Korea have been able to consistently produce highly educated citizens, for a developed country, the U.S. considerably lags behind.

How can positive, effective, and permanent change take place? One thing that needs to happen is that teaching needs to be nationally recognized as a highly important and skilled profession, not something that just “anyone can do.”

Since the Finnish school system was in dire straits as late as a few decades ago, looking at the steps that were taken to institute change in Finland is helpful.

First of all, in Finland, parents respect teachers and value education.

Teachers do not begin teaching until they have undergone a certain level of training and all must obtain master’s degrees. The training that teachers undergo does not drastically vary from one person to another and is based on a solid educational approach and foundation. One issue we have here in America is that teachers are entering the field with dramatically different levels and quality of education. While there are definitely many instructors who are extremely well versed in their field and extraordinary at what they do, there are also teachers that did not learn much in terms of exactly how to teach. There are teachers in American classrooms who cannot write well, perhaps cannot read well, do not employ correct rules of grammar, know nothing about classroom management, and think nothing of traumatizing children. This, in turn, does not provide students with the best of role models.

In Finland, there is a set, standard curriculum that was agreed upon and recorded in the Education Constitution. All students are provided with a bi-lingual education and at a very young age can speak both Swedish and Finnish. Children coming from other cultures are taken into consideration in the Constitution and are able to be educated in their own language before fully entering the Finnish system.

Finnish children attend extremely well-run and intellectually stimulating preschools that are of high caliber and available to virtually all citizens. As a result of this, parents do not have to worry about childcare and children officially enter standard school having already been exposed to a certain level and quality of education.

Finally, the educational approach in Finland is one that is dynamic, interesting, and takes into consideration multiple intelligences.

In order for American education to reach its full potential, a massive overhaul of politics, values, and priorities must take place, one that results in a desire to give all American children the best start they can possibly have in life.

Teaching Language and Respecting Language Diversity

My first experience teaching ELL learners came eleven years ago when I was obtaining TEFL certification. At the time, I was preparing to move to France to teach English, and I wanted to specifically be trained in how to teach non-native speakers a language different from their own. As part of the TEFL training course, the students I taught were 70 and 80 year-old Russian immigrants. All the immigrants had been forced to leave Russia for one reason or another and all were quite eager to learn English. None of the TEFL teacher trainees spoke a word of Russian and our students spoke extremely limited English. In addition to following a specific lesson plan format, TEFL trainees were taught that, no matter what, we shouldn’t speak the native language of our students during instruction. This rule was meant to apply not only to our Russian pupils, but also to any students we would be teaching in the future.

The atmosphere of the TEFL training course was extremely convivial, and we as student trainees really loved both teaching and learning from our Russian students. Though we were not officially told to do so, we all were very interested to know about the lives our students led in Russia and learn about their past experiences. I was quite interested to learn some Russian words, and, overall, a very respectful and happy atmosphere was created by all involved. I fully understand why my TEFL instructors taught trainees not to ever bring the native language of our future students into the classroom----not only might students use this as a crutch, but what happens when the teacher doesn’t speak the language of her/his students in the first place? However, above all, though I think we as teacher trainees already innately had the instinct to show respect for the culture and first language of our students, it was great that our teachers also felt the same way. When writing about ELL, Mari Haneda stresses that there is any number of ways that students can learn another language, but she focuses on the importance of literacy practices at home, school, and the community.

In the course readings we’ve read for class this week, whether learning about trilingualism, bi-lingualism, the primitive language myth or bi-culturalism, a common theme in all articles was to always show respect for the first language/culture of students when teaching in language diverse settings. Not doing so has a high likelihood of having a deleterious effect on learners. During the course of my TEFL training, one of the key factors in teaching approach was to show respect for the language, culture, and overall identity of students, despite not knowing much about how to speak Russian. As a result of this, the TEFL teaching experience was successful and fulfilling. I was then able to take what I learned and apply it to my teaching English to French students in France.

I entered into this role with much eagerness and was quite excited to teach young French pupils. I did find that my TEFL training rule of never speaking to students in their native language didn’t apply so well in this instance----because I was now teaching young children, they constantly asked me questions in French. I speak French fluently, and I found that, when working with young children, always refusing to speak in French meant that we often could not move on from an idea. I wound up finding a happy medium of having to speak French when necessary during the course of a lesson. In contrast to my French pupils, my Russian students at the Boston Language Institute knew that one of the rules of the TEFL program was that speaking in their native tongue during English instruction might impede the learning process.

In Chapter 4 of The Skin That We Speak, Judith Baker discusses trilingualism, an English teaching approach that focuses on the idea of students mastering three different forms of the English language: that which is spoken at home, that which is spoken in a professional setting, and that which is spoken with all formal rules and standards intact. The goal of the trilingual approach to teaching is to help students master the mechanical difference between these three forms of English. Of these three forms of the language, formal English is generally considered superior.

Meanwhile, Lomawaima and McCarty introduce the idea of the primitive language myth, a theory that raises the belief that some languages that exist are savage and less advanced in quality when compared to English. Historically speaking, any Native American language, regardless of tribal group, fell into this category. European settlers deemed all Native American languages primitive, and the learning of English and a western way of life was wrought upon Indians by force. In order to learn how to survive in the changed cultural landscape of North America, Native Americans have been caught in a battle of attempting to hold onto their own cultural languages and identity as well as master English. In this blogger’s personal opinion, any indigenous group in any culture theoretically will face the challenges of bil-lingualism and bi-culturalism if they are dominated and colonialized by an outside group.  

Ultimately, and without exception, all articles we read for this week shared a common theme: in order to have the effective teaching and learning of English and literacy instruction take place, not only must the original languages of students not be criticized or labeled as ‘wrong,’ they should be respected, be left intact, and used in an appropriate setting.