Education and Class

• Education Week: Civic Investment and the ‘Skyboxing’ of Education

  Calling for parents and community groups to support educatino for all children via fund-raising and other resources, not just their own:
  In recent years, we’ve been witnessing the “skyboxing” of American education. Like their socioeconomic peers at ballgames, students in education skyboxes are buffered from realities most students face by their well-appointed educational accommodations: “Need an extra AP program? Right away, sir. Would you like an International Baccalaureate with that?” Meanwhile, the vast majority of students sit in the equivalent of bleacher seats, or they are stuck behind a pillar, squinting to see their teachers in overcrowded classrooms.

  tags: Social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

From the New York Times today,

After several years of state and local budget cuts, thousands of school districts across the nation are gutting summer-school programs, cramming classes into four-day weeks or lopping days off the school year, even though virtually everyone involved in education agrees that American students need more instruction time.

I see no value in adding time to school days to simply do more of what isn’t working otherwise, but I am deeply troubled that these significant shifts in policy are happening with little public deliberation.     Wealthy private school students can readily fall back on private resources if their schools aren’t serving their needs.  Poor children have no such fall-backs.

The comments following this article are telling.

Many commenters see the irony in  the public simultaneously expecting higher performance from students and their teachers while also refusing to invest in the basic levels of support that schools need to at least keep their doors open for a regular school year.

But many  others see this as yet another problem created by teachers.  If teachers would only take pay concessions on their “bloated” salaries and benefits, they argue, schools could stay open.  These writers seem to feel no obligation to do the basic math or to verify their assumptions (public school teachers make twice the salaries of private school teachers  and retire at age 50 …).

And still others argue that private schools do better with less, that schools are too broken to repair, that poor kids won’t benefit from more schooling anyway.

In my state, there is no longer any broader conversation about core values, core social commitments, or the basic levels of funding needed to sustain basic levels of shared public life.  There is only talk about taxation.  By citizen initiative, all new taxes must pass by a super-majority in the Legislature or be sent directly to the voters.  Even minimal taxes on junk food have been rescinded.  We have no state income tax.  Voters turned down an initiative to begin taxing incomes of only the very wealthiest citizens, and the argument was simply that this initiative was “the camel’s nose under the tent” and everyone’s  income would soon be taxed.

I’m reminded of Ruby Payne who argues that the poor live in a  present orientation and therefore can’t think strategically about building positive futures.   Among the poor, we are to understand, this is dysfunctional behavior reflective of dysfunctional values.

But among the rest of us, though, saving pennies of taxes on our Big Gulps as support  for poor children crumbles is understood to be be evidence of fiscal responsibility.

Cross posted from Classism Exposed.

At first glance, I thought that  it was just  another article about disappointing test scores.

I almost didn’t click through to read it, in part because I spend so much time in my teacher education courses trying to contextualize the rhetoric about “the achievement gap” and testing and my students’ role as teachers in closing real and formidable gaps between poor and working class children and their more privileged peers.

We talk about how in the United States, they, as teachers, are framed as the primary players in leveling very uneven economic playing fields.   I explain that  in other countries (especially many of those with  high test scores),  children spend their early years in high-quality child care  and can see a doctor when they’re sick. I explain about social safety nets in other countries that attempt to buffer vulnerable children from insecure  housing, the stresses of parental unemployment, inadequate nutrition, and inconsistent access to basic medical care.

We consider whether some of these things might matter in how children engage in school.

We then talk about how  in the US,  policy makers have instead deemed that they, as teachers will  be responsible for negating  vast  differences in life circumstances — within the four walls of their classrooms.    And if they do not, they can expect to be publicly vilified and will  lose what little remains of their professional dignity and autonomy.

Because, in policy rhetoric about achievement gaps,  achievement is entirely about what teachers do within the four walls of their classrooms.

And eventually we talk, also, about  the deep and fatal flaw in all of this rhetoric about closing the “achievement gap” :  the assumption that at the landing place at the far edge of the gap,  privileged parents will warmly welcome newcomers who now achieve on par with their own children.

Given how much we’ve talked about all of those things in my classes this year,  I wasn’t really surprised when I finally read  that article that I’d almost skipped because it seemed to be just one more account of disappointing test scores.  Because there,  I  read a vivid account of how the teachers I’m working with are being set up to chase an ever-moving target.

The article describes how in elite schools in New York City, wealthy parents anxious about grades and college admissions  are investing tens of thousands of dollars in  private tutors  to sustain their children’s competitive edge.  One parent concedes that her children’s tutoring bill climbed to six figures in a recent year.  The schools are discouraging this for multiple reasons, but the parents will not be dissuaded from hiring “stealth” outside support for their own children.  As one of the tutoring providers explains:

It’s no longer O.K. to have one-on-one coaching for sailing but not academics.

The teachers with whom I work are not preparing children for recreational sailing.

They’re charged with preparing diverse children for a productive place in the raveling economic fabric in their communities, to be confident and vocal citizens, to be ready to go on to whatever forms of higher education they choose.  And increasingly, they are preparing children for cruel competition for access to any of these things.

And if these children do not eventually find productive and dignified work, find their voices in the public square, or thrive in college, blame will fall on the shoulders of their weary teachers, as blame is falling on them now when test scores predict the odds against their students doing any of these things.

Yet as this article illustrates so vividly, academic achievement is not, and never has been, primarily about what teachers do within the four walls of their classrooms.

Many of my teacher education students will start internships in the fall in schools in which families  move mid-week because the eviction notice has been posted,  multiple languages are spoken at home,  parents struggle to sustain dignity after years of unemployment,  and ever-more crowded classrooms are taught be ever-more exhausted teachers.

Imagine what might happen if each of those children in those public school classrooms had unlimited access to  one-to-one support outside of school by highly qualified tutors who are paid more than their full-time teachers.

And if we can’t imagine all children having the same access to whatever supports they need to succeed in school, perhaps  we can at least insist that policy makers imagine poverty reduction programs than entail much more than publicly vilifying the teachers of poor children?

Surely, the 23% percent of the children in this country who are poor deserve much more?

• Teaching About Labor Issues and the Wisconsin Worker Fight Back

  Finding good resources to teach kids about working-class issues and labor history is difficult, so am very happy to find this excellent compilation.

  tags: labor Children’s literature social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Over at the excellent Working Class Perspectives blog, Sherry Linkon has posted a thoughtful and provocative post The Digital Divide Goes to College. Spurred by a recent professional development day in which faculty at her working-class college were encouraged to use technology in innovative ways to support students’ learning, Sherry grapples with what New Media and new uses of technology might mean for poor and working-class students who are likely to have more limited access to technology off campus, who may arrive at college less experienced and less confident in technology, and who have very limited time to learn new skills.

These are vital questions and Sherry is so right when she notes that advocates of technology in teaching may glibly assume that all students (and all campuses) have access to similar resources.

They don’t.

Yet as Sherry notes:

Technology provides opportunities for more active, inquiry-based learning, and many faculty are excited by the possibilities. We see how new media can expand our students’ learning opportunities, engage them in significant questions, connect them with authentic audiences, and help them develop skills for both professional and personal life.

These are the very questions I’ve been grappling with over the past few years, so thought I’d think out loud here.  This is far from a definitive answer, but I have been thinking (and arguing) about these things for some time and trying also to act.  Some things have worked; others are still elusive.

But my thinking on these things today:

For me, these are questions of ensuring that the poor and working class students that I teach are well positioned when they leave my courses and my program to be vocal and active citizens, competitive in job searches, and ethical users of new technologies.

Though my institution is different from YSU (where I used to work with Sherry), we are far from “elite” and my students all commute to campus, most work unbelievable hours while going to school full time, many have limited access to technology off campus (most have internet access* but many have very  old equipment that they share with high school aged children doing homework or spouses running small businesses from home), and many come to campus adamantly believing themselves to be “not a techy”.

I teach teachers about using technology in diverse  classrooms, and increasingly, I use digital tools for assignments in my other courses, too, to connect people doing group work, and to nudge students into developing a public voice, to introduce new tools of persuasion. In the past few years, students have been able to

• Talk directly with the author of one of their texts, via skype. The campus could never have afforded bringing him to campus to speak.
• Create sophisticated multimedia narrative pieces in which they explore their status as first-generation students in powerful and moving ways that went far beyond what they could have created with writing alone.
• Organize a student-led project by which college students mentor first-generation/low-income high school students about going to college. My students could never hold all the organizational meetings required to launch and sustain this project in person because their schedules are impossibly complicated. Instead, they’ve organized their work via a wiki, numerous Google documents, chat and text. Some students sometimes do this work from public libraries; others have their own technology. This project has evolved into a leadership development program for students who otherwise could never participate in conventional student life activities, and is possibly only because of technology.
• Prepare for group class presentations by coordinating asynchronously via Google Presentations and the chat function available there, saving them extra trips to meet group members and the expense of child care while meeting with group members.
• Communicate directly via their blogs with teachers of low-income children to press their thinking about how to use technology in under-resourced schools.
• Students who are too exhausted or too intimidated to speak in class now have numerous ways to contribute to class discussions. (My favorite parts of on-line discussions are those that start with “So, the kids are finally in bed and I wanted to think more about something that we said in class today). I remain amazed at how many more students actively participate when conversation happens in class and on-line — and how many more perspectives are therefore heard by everyone in class.

As with all campuses, we struggle with questions of access, diminishing support, and shrinking campus resources.

And some ways we’ve started to address these real dilemmas:

• With diminishing state resources, our students are charged a very minimal technology fee each quarter. A student committee decides how this money will be spent and most decisions are about access: Expanded lab hours, laptops that can be checked out without fees, upgraded wireless access — and middle-class students subsidize low-income students’ access.
• Librarians make all course readings (except text books) available digitally so that students aren’t paying copying and printing charges.
• Many faculty are moving away from the packaged and expensive “learning management systems” like Blackboard because they are unnecessarily complex while also being technologically limited, because the time invested in teaching students to use these university-specific tools has little to do with developing technology skills that they’ll need beyond college. I instead work with free wikis, blogs, easy website construction pages, and twitter –all of which are free and all of which involve skills transferable to political, community, and job related work.
• Nearly all the tools I now use are accessible on a reasonably sophisticated cell phone (which Pew is showing is the technology portal used by many low-income adolescents). Needless to say, cell phones are not banned in my classes .
• New Media tools (such as those Gardner Campbell is talking about, most of which were developed after the research on which the article on “digital identities” that Sherry cites was done) are infinitely easier to learn than conventional Microsoft products, coding tools, or the more technical software that may be necessary in some degree programs. They are designed to teach users to use them — via video tutorials, on-line help forums, and extensive “how to” on many of these sites. Students aren’t left alone to figure them out — they have extensive , individualized on-line support. Most are free. Very few students that I’ve worked with in the past 3 years require extensive tutorials on these tools; I don’t take much class time to teach them, so that I can make myself available to those so intimidated that they cannot decide where to start setting up their accounts. They get there and they understand that they’ve done a powerful thing when they do.
• A group of faculty just formed a peer-to-peer “e-learning” project in which we’ll share work on digital learning that we’re doing — via tools such Twitter, social bookmarking and blogging (all of which are free). We’ll meet occasionally and have occasional access to an outside consultant, but this is a low-cost project in which we’re learning more from and with  each other about what’s possible.
• Some of us went to the Center for Digital Storytelling for training, precisely because the Center has developed methodologies to enable people with very limited time and limited experience with technology (most of their work is in low-income community settings) to create powerful multimedia projects through which they tell their stories to public audiences. We came back and trained colleagues in a three- day campus workshop; faculty are now experimenting with these very streamlined and often low-cost methodologies across the curriculum.
• For classes that do require more sophisticated software, the campus “key cards” labs so that students enrolled in particular classes who have had training can come in and out of the labs even when the campus can’t afford to staff them — essentially any time that the campus is open.
• I rarely require students to purchase textbooks, and the money that they save buying out-dated books that have little value beyond my course goes a long way toward being able to afford at least a basic netbook on which they can use most social media tools anywhere that they can access wi fi (and in my community, that includes coffee shops, some parking lots on campus even when buildings are closed, McDonald’s, public transportation). Our IT staff has recommended low-cost models to spare students wasting money on equipment that won’t meet their needs.

But I don’t provide alternative assignments, because this isn’t just about pegagogy but about participating in a cultural shift, and  skills of networking, writing for authentic audiences, creating multimedia to explain one’s life circumstances to others, collaboration — I consider all of these to be skills that are now vital to citizenship, community membership, and life-long learning.

And I’m committed that it not be only the middle-class students who develop these skills.

There is so much more thinking to be done about all of this.  What’s going on at other campuses  – beyond all of those for-profit schools that are making a killing by enrolling poor and first-generation students in “on-line” degree programs?

*Sherry cite census data about limited internet access in many homes, and I wonder: If we parse out the many households led by the elderly who may be low income and have low education levels, do we have a more optimistic sense of how many college students (traditional and non-traditional aged) may have access outside of campus?