Education: August 2009 Archives

We're in a recession right now (news flash!), and I don't know one person who's not been impacted by the miserable state of the economy--or I'm just not rich enough. Grandmas, new parents, mid-career folks, everyone's got a story. Check out a web preview of Cindy Von Quednow's cover story for the September/October issue of ColorLines to find out what students of color are doing to stay in school during these trying times.

Cindy writes:

[Mondragon's] campus, where 27 percent of the students are Latino, has also endured massive cuts. Currently the campus faces a $42 million cut and decreasing state support from about $6,400 per student to $5,000, according to the university’s president.

“I think it’s ridiculous when we are taught that we should pursue higher education when the state is not making it financially possible,” said Mondragon, who also works with Students for Quality Education.
Early on, Mondragon knew that her family couldn’t help her pay for college. Until recently, she had fared well on her own with a scholarship and financial aid. But last winter, she had to take a third job after her financial aid was cut.

When discussing the history of race relations in America, any mention of Mississippi usually deserves to be followed by a “god damn.” Nowadays, though, young Mississippians are moving toward an enlightened concept of past civil rights struggles—and making some history in the process.

The state passed a law in 2006 calling for the development of programs to teach human rights and civil rights issues to all public school students, from kindergarten on. In collaboration with the Mississippi Civil Rights Education Commission, state education authorities are getting ready to roll out a social studies framework titled “2010 Mississippi U.S. History: Post-Reconstruction to Present.”

The new curriculum is designed to inform youth about the history of racial discrimination as well as to provide an understanding of the continued relevance of social movements today. The organizations guiding schools as they implement the programs, WAPT reports, include the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy at Jackson State University and the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi.

Charter schools are often marketed as incubators of educational innovation, and they form a key feature of the Obama administration's school reform agenda. But in some urban communities, they may be fueling de facto school segregation.

In Boston, the Globe reports that charters seem to be siphoning students and leaving disadvantaged kids behind:

In Boston, which hosts a quarter of the state’s charter schools, English language learners represented less than 4 percent of students at all but one of the charter schools last year, although they make up nearly a fifth of the students in the school system...

While Boston charter schools had a higher representation of special education students, more than half still lagged at least 6 percentage points below the school district’s average of 21 percent. In urban districts statewide, special education enrollment was 10 percent or lower at about a third of the charter schools.

When financial crisis hit, the California legislature didn't raise taxes, end tax giveaways, or cut corporate welfare. Instead, they cut services to the people made most vulnerable by the recession -- children, the elderly, the sick, victims of domestic violence, AIDS patients, and people just trying to get back to work. Now -- where could our legislature have learned their priorities? Too many movies? ColorLines' Darlene Pagano takes on the Governator in this new video.

Former California State Senator Sheila Kuehl has written an excellent essay detailing exactly who the cuts affect. Spoiler alert: it's not anyone who can bear the burden. Also check out this L.A. Times article that digs into the question of whether Schwarzenegger's last-minute vetoes were constitutional.

The Obama administration wants to ramp up early childhood education, as part of its effort to narrow achievement gaps later in life. But universal preschool may not mean universal access for immigrant families.

In an exploratory study, the Urban Institute examined the experiences immigrant families in Chicago under Illinois's “preschool for all" initiative (PFA), which aims to provide Pre-K to all 3- and 4-year olds. Researchers found intriguing patterns, and differences, in the challenges faced by Pakistani and Nigerian families dealing with a mix of cultural. social and economic factors.

Though both Nigerian and Pakistani families placed similarly high value on early education, the Pakistani families were more likely enroll in school-based programs, while the Nigerian families were more often introduced to preschool through community-based child care. (This could be due in part to the fact Nigerian parents were more likely than Pakistani parents to be working full or part time, so they sought programs that ran on a workday, rather than school schedule.)

Why can't we just get Black kids to recognize the value of an education? At the Root, Cord Jefferson argues that the answer to racial disparities in academic performance is creating “a new way to sell education to young, black men.”

Easier said than done, of course. If the antidote to racialized “underachievement” were just convincing Black kids that straight A's are worth striving for, centuries of educational apartheid could be erased with slick marketing. The "structuralists” in the education field—those who see educational gaps as a byproduct of institutionalized inequity, rather than just poor decision-making—don't quite buy that argument. Yet many do recognize that culture shapes, and is shaped by, social environment as well as individual goals.

The structure vs. culture debate will intensify as America's First Black President moves to inject new funds into “minority-serving institutions” as part of a major investment in higher education.

Jefferson sees a need to harness individualistic drives in “making school cool.” He cites the theories of Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson—which center on the destructive influence of “cool-pose culture” on Black youth—to make the case for a market-based approach to revising Black students' attitudes toward schooling: