FLAT ANNA VISITS LOUISVILLE
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Description
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (written by educator Paulo Freire) proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. It was first published in Portuguese in 1968, and was translated and published in English in 1970.Dedicated to what is called "the oppressed" and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls "the colonizer" and "the colonized". The book is one of the foundations of critical pedagogy.
In the book Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggybank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.
According to Donaldo Macedo, a former colleague of Freire and University of Massachusetts Amherst professor, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a revolutionary text, and people in totalitarian states risk punishment reading it; Arizona's former Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, objected to its use in classrooms. The book has sold over 750 000 copies worldwide.
Summary
Translated into several languages, most editions of Pedagogy of the Oppressed contain at least one introduction/foreword, a preface, and four chapters.The first chapter explores how oppression has been justified and how it is overcome through a mutual process between the "oppressor" and the "oppressed" (oppressors-oppressed distinction). Examining how the balance of power between the colonizer and the colonized remains relatively stable, Freire admits that the powerless in society can be frightened of freedom. He writes, "Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion". (47) According to Freire, freedom will be the result of praxis — informed action — when a balance between theory and practice is achieved.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
BAD TEACHER TRAINING
The stature of the teaching profession continues to diminish exponentially as the profession continues to be comprised mostly of people who performed at the bottom third of their class in undergraduate school. Teaching in a public school insures that teachers, bolstered by the teacher's union, can work to minimum standards with impunity. Most teachers come from the working class; therefore, lack the cultivated experience to recognize that their education was mediocre at best since working class children are educated differently than upper class children. Working class children,some of whom will be future teachers, receive an education predicated on obedience to rules since those are the values that the ruling class wants inculcated in the working class. Working class education with its adherence to rules and conformity fails to be the fertile incubation for the development of brilliance and rebellion required of a great teacher. The essence of great teaching remains the ability to inspire in students the passion and desire to question the status quo even if that could mean questioning the teacher who could be perceived as its embodiment. . Unfortunately, teachers benefit from the statusquo where the unions insure job safety for most teachers who have no incentive to be anything other than mediocre.
The stature of the teaching profession continues to diminish exponentially as the profession continues to be comprised mostly of people who performed at the bottom third of their class in undergraduate school. Teaching in a public school insures that teachers, bolstered by the teacher's union, can work to minimum standards with impunity. Most teachers come from the working class; therefore, lack the cultivated experience to recognize that their education was mediocre at best since working class children are educated differently than upper class children. Working class children,some of whom will be future teachers, receive an education predicated on obedience to rules since those are the values that the ruling class wants inculcated in the working class. Working class education with its adherence to rules and conformity fails to be the fertile incubation for the development of brilliance and rebellion required of a great teacher. The essence of great teaching remains the ability to inspire in students the passion and desire to question the status quo even if that could mean questioning the teacher who could be perceived as its embodiment. . Unfortunately, teachers benefit from the statusquo where the unions insure job safety for most teachers who have no incentive to be anything other than mediocre.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
THE BEST TEACHERS
How stupefying, that a teacher would participate in teaching language arts in the IB program providing rigorous academics denied to her and her own children as members of the working class. Isn't that teacher ever troubled by the incongruity that she has to produce results day after day in a private school, teaching the children of the rich in stark relief to her meager education and that of her children? Who are these people who only want their children educated with the upper class? How ironic those parents and their working class teacher pay lip service to the IB philosophy emphasizing a global community, social constructivism and attention to multiculturalism as they insure it remains upper class multiculturalism. Such hypocrisy. So at the end of her teaching career what will remain will be the teacher's identification with the oppressors.
It takes no talent or effort to teach upper middle class kids. They come to school riddled with resources knowing how to learn, most of them know more than their teachers due to their superior cognitive development, the end product of their enormous financial resources. The real teachers, young people in the” Teach for America “program, college graduates from Harvard and Yale, go into marginal schools and advocate for the resources to educate the marginalized, the disenfranchised in the spirit of social justice. The Teach for America program remains this country’s best effort to remediate educational inequality. The Teach for America program continues to define how to educate, upper middle class college students educating the poor.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
March 12, 2012, 12:31 am
The Reproduction of Privilege
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility as it did for the first decades after World War II, college education today is reinforcing class stratification, with a huge majority of the 24 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 currently holding a bachelor’s degree coming from families with earnings above the median income.
Seventy-four percent of those now attending colleges that are classified as “most competitive,” a group that includes schools like Harvard, Emory, Stanford and Notre Dame, come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families in the bottom quartile.
Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and co-author of “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do about It,” puts it succinctly: “The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege.”
These anti-democratic trends are driven in part by a supposedly meritocratic selection process with high school students from the upper strata of the middle class performing better on SAT and ACT tests than those from poor and working class families.
Contrary to those who say that this is the meritocracy at work, differences in scores on standardized tests do not fully explain class disparity in educational outcomes. When high-scoring students from low-income families are compared to similarly high-scoring students from upper-income families, 80 percent of the those in the top quarter of the income distribution go on to get college degrees, compared to just 44 percent of those in the bottom quarter.
Post-secondary education is not, in fact, functioning to dissolve long-standing class hierarchies. There are various ways of examining these trends, which I’ve outlined below. However you look at it, the cultural and political implications of the deepening of the income achievement gap are profound.
Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the Census, the college “premium” – the difference in annual earnings of a high school graduate and a college graduate – rose from 50 percent to approximately 80 percent. In 2007, workers with a high school degree made an average of $31,286 compared to $57,181, 82.8 percent more, for those with a bachelor’s degree. A college degree does not guarantee affluence, but it puts the recipient in a far better position to achieve or maintain upper-middle-class status than those without degrees.
Higher education itself has polarized: Competitive four-year colleges, as defined by Barron’s, have seen enrollments rise from 41 percent of all post-secondary students to 46 percent from 1994 to 2006; 2-year community colleges at the bottom have seen their share of enrollment grow from 46 to 49 percent. In the middle ground, the percent enrolled at the less competitive four-year colleges has been cut in half, from 13 to 6 percent, according to the Carnevale study mentioned above.
Source: National Education Longitudinal Study: Base Year through Fourth Follow-Up, 1988–2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2000); The Education Longitudinal Study of 2002: Base Year through Second Follow-Up, 2002–2006 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2006).Postsecondary Enrollments, by Type, 1994 and 2006
Student bodies in competitive colleges and in community colleges reflect two very different economic worlds. At the 1,044 competitive colleges, 76 percent of the freshman came from families in the upper half of the income distribution. In the nation’s 1,000-plus community colleges, almost 80 percent of the students came from low-income families.
Low income students are heavily dependent on scholarship aid to go to college, and especially dependent on grants as opposed to loans. Need-based scholarships are one way to increase low-income enrollment, but over the past three decades, the value of Pell Grants – the basic form of federal scholarship aid to poor students – has steadily declined as tuition costs have grown at a much faster rate than inflation. In 1979-80, the maximum Pell Grant covered 99 percent of the cost of a community college, 77 percent at a public four-year college and 36 percent at a private four-year college. By 2010-11, these percentages had dropped to 62, 36 and 15 percent respectively, according to Education Week.
At the same time, colleges, both public and private, have shifted their own spending priorities, modestly increasing the investment in students from families in the lowest income quintile, while sharply boosting their investment in education of students from the top income quintile. The Education Trust has produced the charts showing the shift over a 12-year period, from 1995 to 2007.
SAT scores, in turn, correlate directly to students’ family income. The following charts show this linkage:
Source: College Board
There is a substantial body of evidence that the system is failing to reward students with high test scores who come from low-income families. In a 2005 report, the College Board found that among those scoring highest in math tests in 1992, just under three-quarters of students from families in the highest quartile went on to get bachelor’s degrees by the year 2000. Among those from families in the bottom quartile, less than half that number, 29 percent, went on to get degrees.
As the value of a college degree has nearly doubled, in terms of future earnings, the percentage of low income college students actually graduating by age 24 has grown by only 2.1 points, from 6.2 percent in 1970 to 8.3 percent in 2009. Among students from families in the highest income quartile, the graduation rate by age 24 has surged by 42.2 percentage points, doubling from 40.2 percent to 82.4 percent over the last four decades.
Source: Postsecondary Education Opportunity
“The income-achievement gap is now more than twice as large as the black-white achievement gap. Fifty years ago, in contrast, the black-white gap was twice as large as the income gap,” according to Sean Reardon, a professor of education and sociology at Stanford, writing in “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations:”
“The children of the rich increasingly do better in school, relative to the children of the poor — that is, they score higher on standardized tests and they graduate from college at much higher rates. This has always been true, but is much more true now than 40 years ago,” Reardon told The Times in an email. “This means that social mobility has gotten rarer – the ‘American Dream’ is increasingly difficult to attain.”
Not only does a college degree significantly boost income, it also helps protect against downward mobility. The Pew Charitable Trusts found in a 2011 study that those with just a high school degree or less are 13 percent more likely to experience significant downward mobility – seeing their income fall substantially below what their parents made – than those with college degrees.
The class-reinforcing trends of higher education pose an acute dilemma for the American political system. “The built-in tension between postsecondary selectivity and upward mobility is particularly acute in the United States. Americans rely on education as an economic arbiter more than do other modern nations,” Carnevale wrote in “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do About It.” “Americans always have preferred education over the welfare state as a means for balancing the equality implicit in citizenship and the inequality implicit in markets.”
Politically, the lack of access to a four-year college education is a crucial problem for one of the key battleground constituencies of 2012: whites without college degrees. Several issues that can be mined by enterprising politicians cluster around this debilitating lack of access — in fact they help cause it — including the enormous debt loads carried by students and recent graduates, as well as the emergence of for-profit colleges saddling low-income students with loans for programs they cannot complete. The data show that a disproportionately large percentage of young adults from working-class families who, according to their test scores and grade point averages, are equipped to earn a B.A., are either not going to college, or failing to finish — relegating them to a life of stagnant or declining wages. There is a reservoir of resentment over this fate waiting to be tapped by either party.
Seventy-four percent of those now attending colleges that are classified as “most competitive,” a group that includes schools like Harvard, Emory, Stanford and Notre Dame, come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families in the bottom quartile.
Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and co-author of “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do about It,” puts it succinctly: “The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege.”
These anti-democratic trends are driven in part by a supposedly meritocratic selection process with high school students from the upper strata of the middle class performing better on SAT and ACT tests than those from poor and working class families.
Contrary to those who say that this is the meritocracy at work, differences in scores on standardized tests do not fully explain class disparity in educational outcomes. When high-scoring students from low-income families are compared to similarly high-scoring students from upper-income families, 80 percent of the those in the top quarter of the income distribution go on to get college degrees, compared to just 44 percent of those in the bottom quarter.
Post-secondary education is not, in fact, functioning to dissolve long-standing class hierarchies. There are various ways of examining these trends, which I’ve outlined below. However you look at it, the cultural and political implications of the deepening of the income achievement gap are profound.
Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the Census, the college “premium” – the difference in annual earnings of a high school graduate and a college graduate – rose from 50 percent to approximately 80 percent. In 2007, workers with a high school degree made an average of $31,286 compared to $57,181, 82.8 percent more, for those with a bachelor’s degree. A college degree does not guarantee affluence, but it puts the recipient in a far better position to achieve or maintain upper-middle-class status than those without degrees.
Higher education itself has polarized: Competitive four-year colleges, as defined by Barron’s, have seen enrollments rise from 41 percent of all post-secondary students to 46 percent from 1994 to 2006; 2-year community colleges at the bottom have seen their share of enrollment grow from 46 to 49 percent. In the middle ground, the percent enrolled at the less competitive four-year colleges has been cut in half, from 13 to 6 percent, according to the Carnevale study mentioned above.
Source: National Education Longitudinal Study: Base Year through Fourth Follow-Up, 1988–2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2000); The Education Longitudinal Study of 2002: Base Year through Second Follow-Up, 2002–2006 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2006).Postsecondary Enrollments, by Type, 1994 and 2006“The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege.”— Anthony Carnevale
At the same time, colleges, both public and private, have shifted their own spending priorities, modestly increasing the investment in students from families in the lowest income quintile, while sharply boosting their investment in education of students from the top income quintile. The Education Trust has produced the charts showing the shift over a 12-year period, from 1995 to 2007.
SAT scores, in turn, correlate directly to students’ family income. The following charts show this linkage:
Source: College BoardAs the value of a college degree has nearly doubled, in terms of future earnings, the percentage of low income college students actually graduating by age 24 has grown by only 2.1 points, from 6.2 percent in 1970 to 8.3 percent in 2009. Among students from families in the highest income quartile, the graduation rate by age 24 has surged by 42.2 percentage points, doubling from 40.2 percent to 82.4 percent over the last four decades.
Source: Postsecondary Education OpportunityAt the same time that family income has become more predictive of children’s academic achievement, so have educational attainment and cognitive skills become more predictive of adults’ earnings. The combination of these trends creates a feedback mechanism that may decrease intergenerational mobility. As the children of the rich do better in school, and those who do better in school are more likely to become rich, we risk producing an even more unequal and economically polarized society.The “income achievement gap” – differences in standard test scores and grade point averages – between children from families in the top 10 percent of the income distribution and those from families in the bottom ten percent has been growing. Reardon has found that the income achievement gap between children from the highest and lowest income deciles is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born in 1976.
“The children of the rich increasingly do better in school, relative to the children of the poor — that is, they score higher on standardized tests and they graduate from college at much higher rates. This has always been true, but is much more true now than 40 years ago,” Reardon told The Times in an email. “This means that social mobility has gotten rarer – the ‘American Dream’ is increasingly difficult to attain.”
Not only does a college degree significantly boost income, it also helps protect against downward mobility. The Pew Charitable Trusts found in a 2011 study that those with just a high school degree or less are 13 percent more likely to experience significant downward mobility – seeing their income fall substantially below what their parents made – than those with college degrees.
The class-reinforcing trends of higher education pose an acute dilemma for the American political system. “The built-in tension between postsecondary selectivity and upward mobility is particularly acute in the United States. Americans rely on education as an economic arbiter more than do other modern nations,” Carnevale wrote in “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do About It.” “Americans always have preferred education over the welfare state as a means for balancing the equality implicit in citizenship and the inequality implicit in markets.”
Politically, the lack of access to a four-year college education is a crucial problem for one of the key battleground constituencies of 2012: whites without college degrees. Several issues that can be mined by enterprising politicians cluster around this debilitating lack of access — in fact they help cause it — including the enormous debt loads carried by students and recent graduates, as well as the emergence of for-profit colleges saddling low-income students with loans for programs they cannot complete. The data show that a disproportionately large percentage of young adults from working-class families who, according to their test scores and grade point averages, are equipped to earn a B.A., are either not going to college, or failing to finish — relegating them to a life of stagnant or declining wages. There is a reservoir of resentment over this fate waiting to be tapped by either party.
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“The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege.”— Anthony Carnevale
Thursday, May 24, 2012
The International Baccalaurette Diploma
The International Baccalaureate Program should be banned from all schools in the United States. It is an elitist program to placate the interest of the children of the rich and supported by the tax dollars of working class people whose children endure exclusions on the basis that they lack the intelligence to be in the program. The International Baccalaureate Program syphons off educational resources that could benefit all children in school. Until this country recognizes that the gap of educational achievement fails to rest on the Calvinistic paradigm that few should be chosen to participate in rigorous academics, then the International Baccalaureate Program perpetuates educational inequality in this country.
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