The More Things Stay the Same (Class Assignment no. 3)

This week's presentation touched on the ways in which "tracking" programs in modern American education fail to give students even opportunities to both improve and succeed.

As the reading assignment by Christine Sleeter discussed, the current discourse and policy of United States education systems places a very clear emphasis on performance. The "No Child Left Behind" act demands from educators high marks on standardized testing as evidence of actual education in the classroom. In reality it is forcing teachers to teach kids how to produce the results required of the federal government, causing them to learn even less. Consequently students are stratified based on the promise they show to test well over time. The unfortunate truth that shadows this fact is that the better performing kids tend to be the ones with greater access to educational resources and a tradition of education in their family (class privilege) and a greater understanding of the cultural context that the schooling is coded by (white privilege).

The statistics that Christine Sleeter serve to cement both the matter-of-fact inequalities that an "average" classroom will have as well as the inability for and educator to simply assume the obstacles of each student based on racial or ethnic indicators. I was personally surprised at just how many families were living below the poverty level. I was also surprised at my previous lack of consideration for issues regarding class privilege before reading just how problematic it can be.

The idea of tracking holds much to be explored in terms of identifying why children fall "behind" in schools. Then I thought about the reading assignment on John Mercer Langston. It went through the history of education being extended as a right to African Americans shortly after the American Civil War.

To review quickly, there was (imaginably) widespread resistance and opposition of the fiercest kind to the increasingly progressive policies that expanded the rights of Black Americans to educate themselves. States began to use all manner of tactics to keep down the numbers of educated Blacks in their jurisdiction as people tried to scare Blacks and Whites alike from pursuing advanced Black education. Why? What were they afraid of? What did they have to lose so long as they had white privilege anyway? Could they not have simply gotten over it so long as they didn't have to comply with intergration? Then, author Judith E. King-Calneck made no bones about the true worry of the conservative White America of that time: "the fear was that too much freedom, especially for Americans of African descent, would disrupt the social order."

CAPITALISM (that bastard)--while obviously not operating independently of racism, social exclusion, alterity anxiety, negrophobia, classism, etc.--is to blame for this! Calneck also maintains that nineteenth century writers established the discourse that is still employed today of "schooling as an equalizing power." That just can't happen in a capitalist economy.

In elementary school we are taught that Capitalism is amazing because anybody can make it. The truth was far more complex. Anybody can make it on the backs of those who don't. Where there is capitalism, there is a hierarchy. There is Whites with full access to a proper education, and there are Blacks who face a myriad of structural obstacles to getting the same. There are the kids in class that are promoted through schools with good marks because they are included in the track of kids that "perform better" than the kids that "fall" behind because less is expected of them, and who face a steep curve of under-performance, just like the system originally intended. Cap Bad.

To reform the education system so that no child is truly left behind, so that everyone truly does get ahead, we need to critique the Beast that is Capitalism. Tear that mother down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN_AOVWirzo

--TAHS