As I attended a Catholic High School, my schools demographics were not available through that website. However, I know that my school is not a very diverse school. Unfortunately that was one of the negatives of attending a private school, they commonly lack diverse populations. Whether this was because of school location or school price, I cannot be certain. Either way it is difficult to come to terms with this, because I loved my school and greatly appreciated all the educational opportunities I received from attending it. Yet I can’t say that the lack of diversity is something I can simply pass over, because schools such as mine are contributing to the resegregation of schools across the country. As the rest of the class data suggested, there is a lack of diversity in schools, or at least the schools we all attended. While it is not state-mandated, segregation is occurring in our school systems and it needs to be addressed. It can be viewed as economic segregation, but ultimately this returns to racial segregation. There is no easy way to solve this problem, but acknowledging that this is a reality is the first step. I believe that most people in our society do not see this as an issue, so it must be brought up. That is the only way we can begin to address a long-standing issue of racial division in our democratic school system.

Brown v. Board of Education(1954 & 55) is the most well-known court decision that addresses segregation in schools. In this case, it was decided that school segregation was entirely unconstitutional and overturned the concept of “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson(1896) which legalized segregation. Although Brown v. Board stated school segregation was against the constitution, implementing this decision was difficult. For in the 1950s racism was still rampant throughout society, and the case order was vague and largely ignored. As the decision ordered to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed” many local school districts found ways around this order. There was no clear idea about what “deliberate speed” meant, and little federal enforcement of desegregation. This lead to subsequent court decisions to effectively enforce the order behind Brown v. Board. As the reading highlighted, Green v. County School Board (1968) was the most important of these additional court decisions. In a school district utilizing “freedom of choice” programming, the vagueness of Brown v. Board allowed these schools to be completely segregated. In this court decision, many of the oversights in Brown were addressed. It created a structure in which a school district could be controlled by the local government only after they showed the courts discrimination had been eliminated and resegregation would not be possible. The district would have to display an implementation of non-discriminatory policy before the federal government would return control of the schools to them. It helped enforce the decision of Brown as it went into more specific details about how and at what pace the desegregation of schools would happen. While Green allowed for the implementation of desegregation, it was the Brown decision which was the foundation of desegregation as a whole. Both cases are extremely important to the educational system in the United States, and though both have been overlooked in various ways, remain to be significant cases in our history. As we attempt to fix the resegregation that is occurring in our schools today, we must look back to these decisions to guide us about how we may ensure segregation does not occur in our schools any longer than it already has.

I believe that the concept of school choice is not fundamentally against the democratic vision of public schooling. Honestly, the freedom to choose the educational path as an individual seems to me to be a great act of democracy. To have multiple possibilities for a quality education based on specific student needs does not go against the democratic vision of education for all, it helps ensure that vision is maintained. However, this is in the ideal form of school choice. The form of school choice which is created in order to be a supplemental asset to public schooling, not a competitor. Unfortunately through the expansion of the school choice movement there seems to be a competition forming between public and charter schools, in which supporters of choice wish to rid public schooling completely. This against the democratic vision of school for all. For within this fight people of privilege are often able to find their choice & thrive there, while minorities and low-income students are forced to suffer the consequences of a failing school.

In this form, charter schools are extremely detrimental to the success of the public schools within the same area. If competition is the driving force for the success of these schools, there is no concern for the individual needs of the students. Rather, it becomes a system in which the most driven and successful students are accepted into charter schools, while students who may be struggling in a traditional school setting, or students who do not care at all, are forced to remain in public schools. This creates an atmosphere of success for the charter schools while creating a sense of failure in the public schools. Ravitch points out how charter schools may earn better test scores because they allow all the great students in their school, while denying any students who struggle in typical school settings. This creates the allusion that the charter school type is more efficient than the public school system. However, this is merely an allusion because the schooling is not radically different. Rather it is just that charter schools can become accelerated honors schools while public schools must find ways to motivate the worst students. This then paints public schools negatively in the public eye, while the charters may be adored as schools of innovation. When a public school fails, a proposal to turn that school into a charter school is made. Because there is a false belief that naming a school a charter will immediately fix all of its issues. This has become an easy way out for educators to seem as though they are addressing the failings of our education system without really doing anything at all.

All of these issues that arise from the creation of charter schools display how far they have strayed away from Shanker’s original vision. Charters were meant to be true places of educational innovation, where students with alternative needs may find success in different pedagogies. They were supposed to be educator-run, student-centered institutions that could break away from the traditional educational setting which promotes memorization and test prep. Shanker’s vision is truly amazing. Schools could become places of study within a school itself. A group of students who all have similar issues could become a school within their public school building. This would allow for the individualization of education and that could create phenomenal success in the lives of students. However, this democratic idea was corrupted into a business-oriented structure in which education becomes an industry. It is no longer educator’s creating these schools for the students who struggle inside the traditional school, but a reinforcement of those traditional schools, only specialized to the highly gifted. People began to see charter schools in competition with public schools, and this is how they began to depart from the great idea that Albert Shanker supported in the beginning. Money became more important than the students, and this is the tragedy of 21st century education in the United States.

The question of how I can ensure all of my students feel included in the classroom, especially those within the LGBTQ+ community, is a question I have a hard time answering. When I first thought about this I had a pretty simple answer: utilize inclusive texts/materials to ensure my students within the LGBTQ+ community feel they are being represented in their education. For a while it seemed like a great solution. As an english teacher, I could try to bring in writings from LGBTQ+ authors or stories about LGBTQ+ people. The lack of representation of LGBTQ+ people within the educational system is a large portion of the inequality issue, so utilizing these inclusive texts would be very beneficial to help my students feel included. However, after sitting with this solution for a while it seemed lacking to me. I mean yes, a crucial part of ensuring all of my students feel their voices are heard or represented is making sure we study works from all groups of people. It is beneficial not only for those within the minority community, but also for those who are not a minority community member. Still, I feel as an educator there has to be something more to ensure my students are comfortable with being who they are without any shame or fears others may judge them.

While I am fairly certain there is more to be done, I am not as certain as what that more means. As it has been displayed in class there are groups that can be formed in schools which support LGBTQ+ students and creates an atmosphere of allies for that community. But is that, along with “queering” the curriculum a little bit enough to erase decades of people telling members of the LGBTQ+ community that they are abnormal or less than because of who they love? Are clubs and books promoting equality strong enough to fight the forces of oppression and inequality? I don’t know if they are. However, they are the step in the right direction. Through utilizing resources such as these students of the LGBTQ+ community are less likely to feel like an outsider in society. In running a classroom in which every student is aware that they all have an inherent dignity which requires mutual respect from each other, I think that’s an improvement. So for now, in a world which is slowly growing into a place of acceptance and embracement, I think these steps in the right direction will lead to great advancements towards equality for all.

According to Paulo Freire, with the banking concept, “education becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (104). In this conception of education, students merely become empty vessels that must be filled with static knowledge, instead of growing individuals whose minds are encouraged to develop. The static nature of this concept comes through the process in which the teacher tells a fact, the student then memorizes this fact, and is expected to retell that fact exactly to the teacher. The significance of this fact is unimportant in this method. For learning is not about true understanding, but the deception of it in this educational bank. This leads to a mindlessness nature within education. This statement seems to be contradictory, for how can learning ever be mindless? However, with the banking concept merely depositing facts into the minds of youth, which requires little to no thought, the student becomes passive. The students “learning” becomes unconscious, as they go through the motions of the learning process without truly retaining any information, or more importantly its significance. This unconscious passivity creates a student who believes intelligence is only something relayed to them, not something they can create or develop on their own. The world is not a place which they have power to exert influence, but merely the force which will forever influence the student.

Directly opposing this concept of education is “problem posing” education. This method of teaching consciously objects to communiques and instead promotes authentic communication. This distinction is vital as communiques is a one way process in which only one member is truly conscious(and that may not even be true). However, in authentic communication all participants are consciously involved in the conversation, driving it forward towards new learning. In this method, both student and teacher become actively involved as the learning process in both roles. No longer is the teacher always the one who informs(deposits) and the student always the one who retains(depository). Instead, in the process of communication teacher may learn from student just as student learns from teacher because it is not restricted to the bounds of the conception that factual memorization equates to knowledge. In problem posing, the student becomes active with the issues relating to their own world. They are an active member in their world as they can offer valuable insight and influence. As Freire writes “In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (112). This leaves the student with the knowledge that the world, but like their own minds, are all in process of becoming. Nothing is statically limited to mere facts that must be memorized. Rather, the educational journey is presented as a path in which the student begins to learn how the world grows, and what their own intellectual growth can offer the world.

As the reading has displayed this test prep teaching is a complicated matter. There are forms of good test prep, but in our education system today it is extremely rare. Because testing is no longer about checking for understanding to ensure good teaching, but the goal of teaching. The test has become the “end goal” when further understanding and knowledge should be. Testing has created an atmosphere of short term memory in which the capacity to quickly memorize and then quickly forget will allow you to thrive in school. It has forced teachers to be more concerned with the statistical outcomes of tests rather than their student’s overall education. Test prep undermines good teaching because it looks for the easiest way to ensure fake results. No longer is it important for the students to understand the information, rather just important they are able to deceivingly display they are able to. So teachers skip steps, and just teach to the test.

In the most corrupting forms, test prep looks like nothing but trying to distinguish different methods to merely earn the quick points on tests without any effort. However, there is a disturbing thought that test prep has corrupted even the best of teachers. As a student I am unaware of the lessons my teachers neglected to do in order to focus on the ones on the test. It most likely happened and I was completely ignorant of that fact, and the skipped lessons. Personally I find this thought to be haunting. How much knowledge have I missed out on? Was this really relevant in my education? Has my mind been molded into the most efficient form of knowledge and nothing else? I don’t know the answers to these questions and it bothers me. The lines between contextual instruction and test preparation have been blurred, as a matter of fact absolutely destroyed. There has been a collision of the two, and test prep has come out victorious. This is seen in Koretz’s work as countless teachers state these high-stakes tests have become the curriculum. Education has become an expedient system of scores which falsely represent knowledge, and it is corrupting the minds of the future leaders of our nation.

Like I said testing in its most pure form is a valid method of gaging student understanding. However, as these tests become more and more destructive to the students development, a new method of gaging is very needed. Though many see this as impossible because testing is so deeply engrained into our education system, there has to be a solution to this issue. We cannot keep treating our students like robots who are programmed to memorize facts in order to reproduce them on exams. Rather we need to cultivate minds which are consistently interested in continuously learning and creating. Personally, I find great satisfaction in methods such as seminars and essays. For these methods require students to actively engage in their learning without the pressure of a test. It’s not about getting the answer 100% right, but rather showing a deliberate effort in learning. These methods allow for a student to display what they have already learned while currently learning as well. While I am aware this is not a solution for the entire issue of testing, if we challenge ourselves to discover new ways of “testing” student success, new methods of learning will be found and the students will thrive rather than just memorize.

Race is a complex social structure. The most basic definition of race is skin color. Or at least, this is how race has been generally defined in order to allow one race a superior complex within society. This is seen as those who were not Anglo- Saxon Caucasian, such as Mexican or Asian Americans but not African American, were placed into categories of “colored” because they weren’t white. The issue with this is that the only other race besides white was a melting pot of “coloreds” when in reality those who were in this group were from a variety of cultural backgrounds. The reading demonstrated how this type of racial categorizing led to educational disadvantages as those students who were not white were set to inferior schools. In this way, race is merely a social structure which was enforced in order to allow for discrimination and segregation merely based on skin color.

Students need to be given the freedom to express their cultural heritage proudly. Going along with this, as an educator you are bound to have students of different cultural backgrounds. In this situation, it is imperative to allow that student the freedom to express themselves as it is relevant to their cultural values. For instance, I cannot state that I am “color blind” in my classroom, but rather encourage my students to embrace their heritage and be proud of where they come from. If this is achieved it not only allows each student to gain self-confidence but also allows for a classroom in which mutual respect despite differences is found.

This idea of multiculturalism is relevant to the common school movement because as I said in my previous blog post, though a great ideal the execution of the common school was greatly biased. Though Mann stated he desired a school experience for everyone, it was really only encourage for white Protestants. The “common school” was really only common for the majority race, and left minorities attending racially segregated schools which often had less resources. The schools were not a common experience for every student regardless of their ethnic background, but rather would vary depending on skin tone. Therefore if the common school movement were truly to live up to its ideals, the educational experience would not be subject to racial bias.

I think what struck me most about the video we observed in class was how the categorized the schools as segregated. Though it is easy to walk into a school and see what the racial majority of those students is, it never struck me to consider this a form of racial segregation. However, as the video explains those of caucasian background often attend the better schools while young African Americans are faced with lower socio-economically funded schools. This can lead to inequalities in the future as the education of a student impacts their future careers and lives. The issue needs to be addressed. For this segregation can be detrimental to a youth’s development. For growing up in a multicultural environment teaches valuable life lessons and morals regarding respect and dignity. It will allow for a less divisive society which is greatly needed at the present time.

I think the most interesting part of this reading for me was the objections by both the working class and the upper class. It is fascinating to me the amount of objection both groups had for similar reasons. In the end it all comes down to money. The working class could not afford to pay the tax for a new school, that of which they believed their children would not even benefit from. Likewise the upper class did not want to pay taxes because although they could afford them, they thought they could just educate their children separately. What I find so interesting about this is that this argument about how to pay for public schooling has been going on since it’s very creation. Today there are still debates about how much money, where that money goes, and so on in regard to public schooling. To me it is amazing that despite this opposition from both members of poverty and wealth at the foundation of this movement, it still succeeded.

This concept of the common school is a just ideal. Horace Mann’s idea that an education should be available for all began to highlight the importance of education within society. If a greater majority of the country’s population could be educated, then a greater majority will grow to be contributing members of society. Mann’s battle for the common school was a revolutionary fight in a world in which discrimination and inequality ruled. Whether it be economic status, race or gender education was a system which promoted the continuation of inequality in society. With the establishment of educational opportunity for all this inequality decreases. With all of these positives in mind, there are flaws in the execution of these ideals which included the promotion of Protestantism in what was supposed to be a non-religious setting. It started with Mann and continues today, which is why we are constantly studying ways the school system can improve.

In Catharine Beecher’s section I was most interested in how she used her knowledge of the societal thoughts regarding women at the time, and used them to her advantage. In a society of gender inequality men thought women to only be useful to raise the children and care for the home. Professional development and education was nearly impossible for women because of this. However, Beecher was able to achieve both of these tasks through the teaching profession. Though she had to support the discriminatory thinking in order to convince people, as she had to suggest lower pay for women and their natural inclination towards child care would make them perfect for the job, she did it for a greater purpose. Through her work she was able to get women education and into the professional world which was a great step in the fight for gender equality.

Maxine Greene writes about being “wide awake” in order to lead a moral life. The term wide-awakeness refers to the conscious effort of an individual to make decisions based on their moral beliefs. In order to do this, first the individual must willingly enter into a discussion of sorts with the societal norms that surround them. They must consciously decide which they agree with or not. The essential component of this awakening is the consciousness of the individual. It cannot be accomplished by simply following the status quo or what you think everyone else thinks is right. Rather, an individual who is wide awake is aware of the societal pressures, but does not base their decisions according to them. They make moral decisions based off their own instincts, beliefs, and feelings of right and wrong. This wide-awakenesss cannot be taught as a system of rules such as this is good, and this is bad always. That would force the individual to buy into a system of absolute morality in which they never make decisions as an individual, but rather become a sleeping piece of a large society.

I believe this is why Greene is writing to teachers. Though never an official portion of a teacher’s syllabus or class description, children often learn valuable moral lessons while in school. As children, the school system is their first interaction with a society outside of their family. They are brought to school to learn the basic subjects, but also how to interact with people outside of their family. As students age they are introduced to more and more aspects of society; from the history of nations to the current political atmosphere. Students are exposed to new elements of society and begin to form opinions regarding those lessons without even intentionally doing so. Therefore, morality becomes a major aspect of a child’s education at school. So it is the teachers responsibility to first be wide-awake themselves. This will allow them to not only model morality but encourage their students to awaken as well. For if a teacher is not in tune with their own beliefs and find morality in their own profession, they are often uninteresting and disrespected in the classroom. However, if a teacher is morally awake themselves, they are able to display to their students how to be a consciously contributing member of society. Though morality is never formally taught as a system of rights and wrongs, through the example of their teachers it becomes a major component to the lessons within a child’s education.

Hi Guys! My name is Maggie

I’m a sophomore AYA and English Major – hoping to teach high school English!

I love to read, go on hikes with my dog, kayak, etc. I am an aspiring photographer! I love taking pictures of the amazing people, places and moments I encounter.

While I typically read books rather than essays- this speech by Rev. Gregory J. Boyle is an essay I consider to be an incredibly valuable read. https://news.nd.edu/news/rev-gregory-j-boyle-sj-2017-laetare-address/ – In his speech he talks about going to the margins of society in order to help erase those margins. Rather than viewing this as an act of charity, “the measure of our compassion lies not in our service of those on the margins but only in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them”. With this perspective, service comes not from a desire to help one less fortunate but create an atmosphere of compassion in which we know each other’s suffering and help each other through it.

I am going to be a tutor with the Youth For Justice program at St. Francis. I did this last semester as well and it’s a great experience. It focuses on helping students with the task of creating a solution for a social justice issue they are passionate about.

I think that mutual respect in class discussions is vital for an effective class discussion. Though we might not always agree with one another, we should never disrespect one another because of it.

Though it may seem like a non-issue I believe that technology is a great concern for educators today. From my classroom observations and personal experience I have seen how distracting this technology can be in the classroom. Also, with the rise of social media there is a great concern for children’s self-image because social media, while having many positive aspects, can be detrimental for a child’s self-confidence.

A question I have for Dr. Shutkin is why did you decide to teach potential teachers?

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton