The major influence that helps shape urban schools in America is the history of the United Sates: more specifically, its population, industrialization/globalization, and education. History provides the opportunity to look back at a point in time objectively to learn and grow from either the strengths or downfalls of the time frame or events being scrutinized. Fruchter commences with an important Supreme Court case in 1954 and makes observations on how some important events, since then, have shaped our urban educational system’s progress or lack there of, whereas Anderson and Summerfield compare and contrast urban, rural, and suburban schools while sharing and exposing the myths and the history going back to the roots of educational philosophies, rural schooling.
The Frutcher piece opens with these three influences, population, industrialization/globalization, and education, introducing the Brown vs. the Board of Education case from 1954. He states, “the nation’s schools are more segregated [now] than they were when the case was decided” (p. 7). In the 1950’s, the population of the United States was growing rapidly racially and culturally facing major issues such as the struggles of (de)segregation and the emigration of minorities looking for the land of the free and opportunity. Unfortunately, “the United States as a nation is but 228 years old and existed as a slave nation longer than it has existed as a free one” (p. 7).
The population, fearing integration, opposed, many times violently, keeping the schools segregated by making alternate schools for the whites to go, thus creating achievement gaps between the white alternate schools and the “minority” schools. Segregation was also due to industrialization/globalization and expansion of roads, driving the white-middleclass out into the suburbs leaving urban areas all ‘black’ (p. 9). The threat of integrated schooling also created additional issues, gaps, in the economic classes, “low-cost mortgages, subsided by the federal government [was] made available almost entirely to white families only (p. 13). Although the Brown vs. Board of Education case was passed to alleviate segregation, Fruchter feels that the Supreme Court tricked the nation into believing that something was being done towards equality, but feels that nothing has really been carried out successfully or purposefully and this is evident in the issues facing our urban schools today.
What purports to be an analysis of the inevitable failure American public education turns out to be an analysis of the failure of urban public education, in other words, that one third of all our school systems serving poor African American and Latino students. An analysis that cloaks itself in universal rhetoric is actually locating far more specific failure in our nations urban schools and blaming the ethnic and racial diversity of our nation’s urban population for this failure. (p.18)
Dropout rates and achievement gaps in urban areas are more so than in suburban and rural schools. This is due to the variety of cultures living in these centers whose parents may not speak English, creating a communication barrier between home and school. Also, many of these families are poor, so the parents, who may be working more than one job to provide for their families, may not be at home to keep their kids on task with their studies or homework and may also have no control of what their children are doing after school hours. Parents play an important role in students’ success academically providing stability, encouragement, and support, which many of these families may not have. Bourdieu, a French sociologist has “defined and elaborated a concept he called ‘habitus’ by which he meant the values, beliefs, assumptions, expectations, symbols, and rituals of the society’s dominant classes” (p. 28). This theory suggests that students, people take in the dominant culture around them and this shapes their interactions, knowledge, and language. In John Edgar Wideman’s Brother’s and Keepers, Robby describes the culture of the 1960’s urban area he grew up in, “‘normal’ was poverty, drugs, street crime, Vietnam, or prison” (p. 33). This perspective of life is not uncommon in urban areas can influence the behavior and success of the inhabitants there.
Not all urban schools and students fail. “Schools serving the children of our military personnel stationed both in this country and abroad, are run by the department of Defense Education Activity agency, or DoDEA” (p. 19) and have a high achievement within their black students. There is question to whether there is validity in the comparison because military bases differ from urban schooling in discipline and expectations of education and also in they way economically that they are comprised; There are no class extremes, wealthy or poor. Nonetheless, the achievement gap between the students of color and whites has nearly closed in these schools. “DoDEA’s successes indicate that school cultures can be organized to produce high levels of academic achievement by their students of color” (p. 23). Frutcher emphasizes that the DoDEA schools are not the answer for “the reform of low-performing urban schools. But it is an important example of how school cultures can be organized, at scale, to produce academic successes for students of color…using the organizational structure that combines accountability and autonomy” (p. 23).
The work of Chubb and Moe suggests that “democratic control of public education inevitably produces bureaucracy, and bureaucracy inevitably produces ineffective schooling” (p. 15). The theory of bureaucracy isn’t upheld in DoDEA schools and is evidenced by the high achievement of all of their students, although they are run through congress offering the same standards and curricula through all of its schools. But it offers the right balance of autocracy and homogeneity in each individual school it needs for success. Chubb and Moe state:
Social homogeneity (a political category that involves substantial agreement about education issues) seems to characterize broad political agreement about the goals, policies, and practices of public education. Chubb and Moe then argue that such homogeneity is far more characteristic of suburban and rural settings than of urban areas, and that urban areas are far more heterogeneous, diverse, contentious, and problem-ridden. (p. 17)
Anderson and Summerfield would agree that suburban and rural schools share more characteristics of homogeneity than urban schools but they would argue that suburban and urban schools are more alike statistically than one much imagine. Further, what one conceptualizes as being rural may even find is more urban that previously perceived.
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics NCES, “Nevada schools (11.5 rural) were more urbanized than New York State’s schools (16.7 rural)” (p. 30). The NCES conducted a crime study from urban and suburban schools in 1999 and found “the long held beliefs about urban school violence and the suburban school environment [being safer] would appear to be challenged by national crime fighters” (p.31). Chubb and Moe’s idea of heterogeneity in urban schools is accurate, but the “problem-ridden” stereotype labeled to urban schools is not always necessarily true. Here, crime wise, suburban areas are statistically worse-off than urban areas.
The myths implying the student-teacher ratio as being much less in urban areas and students being lost in the educational system due to large class sizes, is not true according to the NCES. In fact, “the ratio for all schools is approximately the same” (p. 31). In addition, the NCES found that suburban schools pay out the most expenses to things other than instruction, whereas rural schools pay more towards instruction, but get more state funding making them “less expensive to the locals and more expensive to the state. [This is] a surprising find to someone who believes that urban schools are overburdened with administrative costs” (p. 32) and that smaller schools, rural schools are less expensive and better. Thomas Jefferson saw small schools, rural schools as the foundation for the future.
Historically, rural schools, the one room schoolhouse, taught lessons that started with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This was Thomas Jefferson’s vision: that everyone would be morally educated from the bible and America would be a “ nation of yeoman farmers” (p. 34). It was in the 1920’s that there was a real distinction between an urban school and a rural school. Urban schools started out as comprehensive high schools teaching vocations to the working class, due to industrialization and Jefferson’s rural ideal was lost. The creation of the urban school was “ideal living in the industrialized world. The men could work in the city while the children were raised and schooled in the country” (p. 36). After the Second World War, reform in the educational system was deemed necessary because the world had changed and moved too far away from the Jefferson ideals to go back. “To [try and] capture the ideals of rural America” (p. 36), the idea of small schools created a reform, a movement, Sizer calls the “Essential School” (p. 37) that goes back to the idea of the academies; “the original academy was a garden or grove near Athens’ that numbered Plato among its members. This was the original rural school” (p. 38).
What is most interesting about the essential school movement is its historical antecedent: the New England academy of the nineteenth century, which Sizer documented. The academies, like essential or core curriculum schools, did not have vocational education. Essential schools tend toward the size and organization of the academy model; they tend to be community based, i. e. homogenous. The administration is minimal, the bureaucracy limited, and one finds the teacher facing his multiaged homogenous community and teaching the essential knowledge of the world to the future small farmers that Jefferson so revered (p. 38).
Fruchter and Chubb & Moe would agree this concept of the Essential School to be a successful one based on the homogeneity, small class sizes, minimal bureaucracy, and teachings of knowledge important for success in the world. The history of the United States, its population, industrialization/globalization, and education have contributed greatly in shaping urban schools. What we take from this, that is, what we have learned make for interesting reforms and trial and error pedagogy in our schools. As for the unresolved issue of segregation, I don’t know if that will ever truly be resolved. It is however in human nature for humans to find a level of conformability in sticking with other members of their culture or race. In a way, we segregate ourselves purposefully. Perhaps we should study our behaviors more as to how cultures and individuals naturally react within society and use this information along with the psychology behind how students effectively learn and apply it to the real life competences and successful pedagogies. We ultimately need to stop trying to change how we innately act as humans and adapt our lives and learning to the natural processes we inherently possess. The need for greater understanding of ourselves as a human race and knowledge will give us the tools we need to prosper in any situation including our educational system, especially in urban schools.
No comments:
Post a Comment