#American Public Education
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its not until im relearning basic math for my college algebra course do I realize how fucked I was despite being in advance math all my life. Thank fuck now I have a friend who was a professional math tutor helping me when I don't remember/know the basics.
FYM you saw a bunch of "advance" third graders learning basic division and this one kid had to keep doing subtraction down the entire length of the margin instead of long dividing like everyone else and you just????? Never corrected them?? Never once took the three minutes to reexplain how to do it?? Because it took until 5th grade when the teacher was doing review that I finally understood what I was suppose to be doing. Why did it take two whole years for someone to take the few minutes to get me to understand a fundamental building block of math??
No kid left behind my ass.
And I dont even know if I can 100% blame just any of my teachers because our class sizes were upper 20s if not 30 even in elementary school. That's a lot of kids. And no i couldn't get help from my parents a lot of the time, they were both working.
But like. Cmon.
#american education system#american public education#writing this post has me googling how to long divide cuz now im doubting if I even remember how to do ffs#am i stupid or was I failed or is it both
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The Death of School 10! How Declining Enrollment Is Threatening The Future of American Public Education.
â By Alec MacGillis | August 26, 2024
The building that housed Rochesterâs now shuttered School 10. Such closures ârend the community,â a professor of education said.Photographs by Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New Yorker
In The Nineteen-Nineties, when Liberia descended into civil war, the Kpor family fled to Ivory Coast. A few years later, in 1999, they were approved for resettlement in the United States, and ended up in Rochester, New York. Janice Kpor, who was eleven at the time, jokingly wonders whether her elders were under the impression that they were moving to New York City. What she remembers most about their arrival is the trees: it was May, yet many were only just starting to bud. âIt was, like, âWhere are we?â â she said. âIt was completely different.â
But the Kpors adapted and flourished. Janice lived with her father in an affordable-housing complex close to other family members, and she attended the cityâs public schools before enrolling in St. John Fisher University, just outside the city, where she got a bachelorâs degree in sociology and African American studies. She found work as a social-service case manager and eventually started running a group home for disabled adults.
She also became highly involved in the schooling of her three children, whom she was raising with her partner, the father of the younger two, a truck driver from Ghana. Education had always been highly valued in her family: one of her grandmothers had been a principal in Liberia, and her mother, who remained there, is a teacher. Last fall, when school started, Kpor was the president of the parent-teacher organization at School 10, the Dr. Walter Cooper Academy, where her youngest child, Thomasena, was in kindergarten. Her middle child had also attended the school.
Kpor took pleasure in dropping by the school, a handsome two-story structure that was built in 1916 and underwent a full renovation and expansion several years ago. The school was in the Nineteenth Ward, in southwest Rochester, a predominantly Black, working- and middle-class neighborhood of century-old homes. The principal, Eva Thomas, oversaw a staff that prided itself on maintaining a warm environment for two hundred and ninety-nine students, from kindergarten through sixth grade, more than ninety per cent of whom were Black or Latino. Student art work filled the hallways, and parent participation was encouraged. School 10 dated only to 2009âthe building had housed different programs before thatâbut it had strong ties to the neighborhood, owing partly to its namesake, a pioneering Black research scientist who, at the age of ninety-five, still made frequent visits to speak to students. âWhen parents chose to go to this particular school, it was because of the community that they have within our school, the culture that they have,â Kpor told me.
Because she was also engaged in citywide advocacy, through a group called the Parent Leadership Advisory Council, Kpor knew that the Rochester City School District faced major challenges. Enrollment had declined from nearly thirty-four thousand in 2003 to less than twenty-three thousand last year, the result of flight to the suburbs, falling birth rates, and the expansion of local charter schools, whose student population had grown from less than two thousand to nearly eight thousand during that time. Between 2020 and 2022, the districtâs enrollment had dropped by more than ten per cent.
The situation in Rochester was a particularly acute example of a nationwide trend. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, public-school enrollment has declined by about a million students, and researchers attribute the drop to families switching to private schoolsâaided by an expansion of voucher programs in many red and purple statesâand to homeschooling, which has seen especially strong growth. In addition, as of last year, an estimated fifty thousand students are unaccounted forâmany of them are simply not in school.
During the pandemic, Rochester kept its schools closed to in-person instruction longer than any other district in New York besides Buffalo, and throughout the country some of the largest enrollment declines have come in districts that embraced remote learning. Some parents pulled their children out of public schools because they worried about the inadequacy of virtual learning; others did so, after the eventual return to school, because classroom behavior had deteriorated following the hiatus. In these places, a stark reality now looms: schools have far more space than they need, with higher costs for heating and cooling, building upkeep, and staffing than their enrollment justifies. During the pandemic, the federal government gave a hundred and ninety billion dollars to school districts, but that money is about to run dry. Even some relatively prosperous communities face large drops in enrollment: in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where enrollment has fallen by more than a thousand students since the fall of 2019, the city is planning to lay off some ninety teachers; Santa Clara, which is part of Silicon Valley, has seen a decrease of fourteen per cent in a decade.
On September 12, 2023, less than a week after the school year started, Rochesterâs school board held what appeared to be a routine subcommittee meeting. The room was mostly empty as the districtâs superintendent, Carmine Peluso, presented what the district called a âreconfiguration plan.â
A decade earlier, twenty-six hundred kindergarten students had enrolled in Rochesterâs schoolsâroughly three-quarters of the children born in the city five years before. But in recent years, Peluso said, that proportion had sunk to about half.
Within ten years, Peluso said, âif we continue on this trend and we donât address this, weâre going to be at a district of under fourteen thousand students.â The fourth-largest city in New York, with a relatively stable population of about two hundred and ten thousand, was projecting that its school system would soon enroll only about a third of the cityâs current school-age population.
Peluso then recommended that the Rochester school district close eleven of its forty-five schools at the end of the school year. Kpor, who was watching the meeting online, was taken aback. Five buildings would be shuttered altogether; the other six would be put to use by other schools in the district.
School 10 was among the second group. The school would cease to exist, and its building, with its new gymnasium-auditorium and its light-filled two-story atrium, would be turned over to a public Montessori school for pre-K through sixth grade, which had been sharing space with another school.
Kpor was stunned. The building was newly renovated. She had heard at a recent PTA meeting that its studentsâ over-all performance was improving. And now it was being shut down? âI was in disbelief,â she said. âIt was a stab in the back.â
School Closures Are a Fact of Life in a country as dynamic as the United States. Cities boom, then bust or stagnate, leaving public infrastructure that is incommensurate with present needs. The brick elementary school where I attended kindergarten and first grade, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was closed in the early eighties, as the cityâs population declined, and then was razed to make way for a shopping plaza.
Still, there is a pathos to a closed school that doesnât apply to a shuttered courthouse or post office. The abandonment of a building once full of young voices is an indelible sign of the action having moved elsewhere. There is a tangible cost, too. Researchers have found that students whose schools have been closed often experience declines in attendance and achievement, and that they tend to be less likely to graduate from college or find employment. Closures tend to fall disproportionately on majority-Black schools, even beyond what would be expected on the basis of enrollment and performance data. In some cities, efforts to close underpopulated schools have become major political issues. In 2013, Chicago, facing a billion-dollar budget deficit and falling enrollment, closed forty-nine schools, the largest mass closure in the countryâs history. After months of marches and protests, twelve thousand students and eleven hundred staff members were displaced.
Now, as a result of the nationwide decline in enrollment, many cities will have to engage in disruption at a previously unseen scale. âSchool closures are difficult events that rend the community, the fabric of the community,â Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford, said. He has been collecting data on declining enrollment in partnership with the Associated Press. âThe concern I have is that itâs going to be yet another layer of the educational harm of the pandemic.â
Janice Kpor knew that her family was, in a sense, part of the problem. Her oldest child, Virginia, had flourished in the early grades, so her school put her on an accelerated track, but it declined to move her up a grade, as Kpor had desired. Wanting her daughter to be sufficiently challenged, Kpor opted for the areaâs Urban-Suburban program, in which students can apply to transfer to one of the many smaller school districts that surround Rochester; if a district is interested in a student, it offers the family a slot. The program began in 1965, and there are now about a thousand children enrolled. Virginia began attending school in Brockport, where she had access to more extracurricular activities.
Supporters call Urban-Suburban a step toward integration in a region where city schools are eighty-five per cent Black and Latino and suburban districts are heavily white. But critics see it as a way for suburban districts to draw some of the most engaged families out of the cityâs schools; the selectiveness of the suburban districts helps explain why close to a quarter of the students remaining in the city system qualify for special-education services. (The local charter schools are also selective.) One suburban district, Rush-Henrietta, assured residents that it would weed out participants who brought âcity issuesâ with them, as Justin Murphy, a reporter for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, wrote in his book, âYour Children Are Very Greatly in Danger,â a history of segregation in the cityâs schools.
Kpor understood these concerns even as she watched Virginia thrive in the suburbs, then go on to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology. As Kpor saw it, each childâs situation was unique, and she tried to make decisions accordingly. âItâs where theyâre at,â she said. âItâs not all or nothing for me.â
She enrolled her middle child, Steven, in School 10 for kindergarten and immediately liked the school, but stability was elusive. First, the school moved to temporary quarters for the renovation. Then came disagreements with a teacher who thought that her sonâs behavioral issues stemmed from A.D.H.D. Then the pandemic arrived, and her son spent the final months of second grade and most of third on Zoom. For fourth grade, she decided to try Urban-Suburban again. He was accepted by Brockport, which sent a bus to pick him up every morning.
Other parents shared similar accounts with me of the aftermath of the pandemic closures. Ruthy Brown said that, after the reopening, her childrenâs school was rowdier than before, with more frequent fights and disturbances in the classroom; a charter school with uniforms suddenly seemed appealing. Isabel Rosa, too, moved her son to a charter school, because his classmates were âgoing bonkersâ when they finally returned to in-person instruction. (She changed her mind after he was bullied by a charter-school security guard.) Carmen Torres, who works at a local advocacy organization, the Childrenâs Agenda, watched one of her client families get so frustrated by virtual instruction that they switched to homeschooling. âEnough is enough,â Torres recalled the mother saying. âMy kids need to learn how to read.â
But, when it came time to enroll Thomasena, Kpor resolved to stick with the district, and she was so hopeful about her daughterâs future at School 10 that she took the prospect of its closure with great umbrage. She and other parents struggled to understand the decision. One of the reasons School 10 was chosen to close was that it was in receivershipâa designation for public schools rated in the bottom five per cent in the state, among Pelusoâs criteria for closureâbut Kpor knew that the receivership was due not only to low test scores but also to the schoolâs high rate of absenteeism, which was, she believed, because the school roster was outdated, filled with students who were no longer there. According to a board member, the state had also placed School 10 on a list of dangerous schools, partly owing to an incident in which a student had been found with a pocketknife.
Making matters worse, for Kpor, was that the building was going to be turned over to another program, School 53, the Montessori school. It would be one thing for School 10 to be shut down because the district needed to cut costs. But the building had just been renovated at great expense, an investment intended for School 10, and now those students and teachers were being evicted to make room for others. âIt was more of an insult,â Kpor said, âbecause now you have this place and all these kids and a whole bunch of new kids in the same building, so what is the logic of, quote-unquote, closing the school?â
The awkwardness of this was not lost on the parents of School 53. The school had a slightly higher proportion of white families and a lower one of economically disadvantaged students than School 10, and it was expected to draw additional white families once it moved to its new building. âThe perception is that youâve got the kids at this protected, special schoolâyou can see the difference between what they get and what we get,â Robert Rodgers, a parent at School 53, told me. âIf I was a parent at School 10, I would be livid.â
After Peluso announced the plan, the district held two public forums, followed by sessions at the targeted schools. The School 10 auditorium was packed for its session, and Kpor lined up at the microphone to speak. She asked Peluso if Thomasena and her classmates would get priority for placement in School 53, so that they could stay in the building. âI do not want her to go to any other school,â she said. âEvery time we think weâre doing something right for our kids, someone comes in and dictates to us that our choices are not valid.â Kpor was encouraged to hear Peluso say that School 10 kids would get priority.
Janice Kpor, whose youngest child had just started at School 10 when the city announced its closure.
On October 19th, five weeks after the announcement, the school board met to vote on the closures. During the public-comment period, a teacher from School 2 pleaded with the board to let its students enroll at the school that would be replacing it. A teacher from School 106 asked that the vote be delayed until after board members visited every school, including hers, which was engaged in a yearlong special project geared toward the coming total solar eclipse, so that they could get a more visceral sense of the schoolâs value. The principal of School 29, Joseph Baldino, asked that the schoolâs many students with autism-spectrum disorder be kept together, along with their teachers, during the reassignment. âTheyâre unique, theyâre beautiful, and they donât do real well with change,â he said. Chrissy Miller, a parent at the school, said of her son, âHe loves his staff . . . he loves his teachers, and he wants everybody to stay together as one.â
In the end, the closures passed, five to two.
In September, 2020, as many public schools in Democratic-leaning states started the new academic year with remote learning, I asked Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, whether she worried about the long-term effects on public education. What if too many families left the system in favor of homeschooling or private schoolsâmany of which had reopenedâand didnât come back? She wasnât concerned about such hypotheticals. âAt the end of the day, kids need to be together in community,â she said.
The news from a growing number of districts suggests that the institution of public schooling has indeed suffered a lasting blow, even in cities that are better funded than Rochester. In Seattle, parents anticipate the closure of twenty elementary schools. The state of Ohio has witnessed a major expansion of private-school vouchers; in Columbus, a task force is recommending the closure of nine schools.
In Rochester, the continuing effects of the pandemic weighed heavily on some. Camille Simmons, who joined the school board in 2021, told me, âA lot of children felt the result of those decisions.â She went on, âThere were a lot of entities at play, there were so many conversations going on. I think we should have brought children back much sooner.â
Adam Urbanski, the longtime president of the Rochester teachersâ union, said that the union had believed schools should not reopen until the district could guarantee high air quality, and it had not been able to. âWhen I reflect back on it, I know that I erred on the side of safety, and I do not regret the position that we took,â he said.
But Rebecca Hetherington, the owner of a small embroidery company and the former head of the Parent Leadership Advisory Council, the group Kpor was part of, feared that the district would soon lack the critical mass to remain viable. âI am concerned there is a tipping point and weâre past it,â she said. Rachel Barnhart, a former TV news reporter who attended city schools and now serves in the county legislature, agreed. âItâs like youâre watching institutions decline in real time,â she told me. âAnchors of the community are disappearing.â School districts have long aspired to imbue their communities with certain shared values and learning standards, but such commonality now seemed inconceivable.
By the spring of 2024, parents at the eleven targeted schools were too busy trying to figure out where their children would be going in the fall to worry about the long term. A mother at School 39, Rachel Dixon, who lived so close to the school that she could carry her kindergartner there, was on the wait list for School 52 but had been assigned to School 50. She wasnât even sure where that was. Chrissy Miller was upset that School 29âs students with autism were being more broadly dispersed than promised; she worried that her sonâs assigned school wasnât equipped for students with special needs. Many of her fellow School 29 parents were now considering homeschooling or moving, she said, and added, âWe donât have trust in the district at all.â It was easy to envision how the closures could compound the problem, leading to even fewer students and even more closures.
Thomasena had been assigned to School 45, which was close to her familyâs home but less convenient for Kpor than School 10, which was closer to her work. Kpor wondered how many other families were in similar situations, with assignments that didnât take into account the specific context of their lives. âAll of this plays into why kids are not going to school,�� she said. âYouâre placing kids in locations that donât meet the familiesâ needs.â
She had taken Pelusoâs word that students from School 10 would be given priority at the Montessori school taking its place, and she was disappointed to learn that Thomasena was thirtieth on the wait list there. It was also unclear to her which branch of the central office was handling placement appeals. âItâs all a jumble, and no one really knows how things work,â she said.
On March 26th, as families were dealing with the overhaul, Peluso announced that he was leaving the district to become the superintendent of the Churchville-Chili district, in the suburbs. The district was far smaller than Rochester, with some thirty-eight hundred students, more than seventy per cent of them white, but the job paid nearly as much. âItâs one of the hardest decisions Iâve had,â Peluso said at a news conference. âThereâs a lot of commitment Iâve had to this district.â Rodgers, the School 53 parent, told me, âThis hurts. Itâs another situation where the suburbs are taking something from the city.â
Parents and district staff tried to make sense of Pelusoâs departure. Some people speculated that he had grown tired of the treatment he was receiving from certain board members. Other people wondered if he simply wanted a less challenging district. Peluso told me, âIt was the best decision for me and my family.â
In Late June, I returned to Rochester for the final days of the school year. I stayed at School 31 Lofts, a hotel in a former schoolhouse that was built in 1919. (The Web site advertises âWhimsyHistorySerenity.â) An empty hallway was still marked with a âFallout Shelterâ sign. I stayed in a room that, judging from its size and location, might have been a faculty lounge.
One afternoon, I met with Demario Strickland, a deputy superintendent whoâd been named interim superintendent while the school board searched for a permanent replacement for Peluso. Strickland, a genial thirty-nine-year-old Buffalo native who moved to Rochester last year, was the seventh superintendent of the district since 2016. He told me that he was not surprised the closures had prompted such protests. âSchool closures are traumatic in itself,â he said.
But he defended the district against several of the criticisms I had heard from parents. School 10 had been improving, he said, but still fell short on some metrics. âEven though they met demonstrable progress, we still had to look at proficiency, and we still had to look at receivership,â he said. And, he added, School 53 had limited slots available, so the district had made no promises to parents of School 10 about having priority.
Still, he said, the district could perhaps have been more empathetic in its approach. âThis process has taught me that, in a sense, people donât care about the money,â he said. âWhen you make these decisions, you really have to think about the heart. Thatâs something we could have done a little more. It makes senseâweâre wasting money, throwing money away, we have all these vacancies, that makes sense to us. But our families donât care about that. Our families want their school to stay openâthey donât want to do away with it.â
At the end of the academic year, Rochester closed eleven of its forty-five schools, including School 39.
I asked him whether he worried that the districtâs enrollment decline might continue until the system could no longer sustain itself, as Hetherington and Barnhart feared. âI try not to get scared about the future,â he said.
On the second-to-last day of the school year, I went to School 10 to join Kpor at the end-of-year ceremony for Thomasenaâs kindergarten class. She and her fourteen classmates sang songs, demonstrated spelling on the whiteboard, and rose one by one to say what they had liked best about kindergarten. âEducation and learning,â Thomasena, a tall girl with her front teeth just coming in, said. âWhen itâs the weekend,â one boy said, to the laughter of parents.
It was not hard to see why Kpor and other parents were sorry to leave the school, with its gleaming new tile work and hardwood-composite hallway floorboards. A few weeks earlier, the latest assessment results had shown improvement for School 10, putting it close to citywide averages. âAll of us are going to be going to different places, but I hope one day that I get to see you again,â the classâs teacher, Karen Lewis, said.
Kpor was still waiting to find out if she had moved up on the list for School 53. I asked if she might have Thomasena apply for Urban-Suburban, like her siblings, and she said she was hoping it would work out in the district. âI still have faith,â she said. Outside, I met a parent who was worried about how her daughter would fare at her new school after having been at School 10 with the same special-needs classmates and teacher for the past three years. âThe school has been amazing,â she said.
The Next Day, I attended a school-wide Rites of Achievement ceremony in the gym. Parents cheered as students received awards for Dr. Walter Cooper Character TraitsâResponsibility, Integrity, Compassion, Leadership, Perseverance, and Courage. (Thomasena won for Courage.) Thomas, the principal, called up the schoolâs entire staff, name by name. The shrieks from the assembled children for their favorite teachers and aides indicated the hold that even a school officially deemed subpar can have on its students and families: this had been their home, a hundred and eighty days a year, for as long as seven years.
Walter Cooper himself was there, watching from a thronelike chair with gilt edges. Eventually, he addressed the children for the last time, recounting his upbringing with a father who had received no formal schooling, a mother who preached the value of education, and six siblings, all but one of whom had gone to college. âThe rule was we had to have a library card at seven. We didnât have a lot in this community, but we had books,â he said. âThere are always things in the street for you, but there is much more in books. . . . The guiding thesis is: books will set you free.â
The children sang a final song: âI am a Cooper kid, a Dr. Walter Cooper kid, I am, I am / I stand up for whatâs right, even when the world is wrong.â Sylvia Cooksey, a retired administrator who is also a pastor, gave the final speech. âNo matter where you go, where you end up, you are taking part of this school with you,â she said. âYou are taking Dr. Walter Cooper with you. Weâre going to hear all over Rochester, âThat child is from School 10.â â
After the assembly, I asked Cooper what he made of the closure. âItâs tragic,â he said. âIt points to the fundamental instability in the future of the schools. Children need stability, and they arenât getting it in terms of the educational process.â
Wanda Zawadzki, a physical-education teacher who had worked at the school for eight years and received some of the loudest shrieks from the kids, stood looking forlorn. She recalled the time a class had persuaded the city to tear down an abandoned house across the street, and the time a boy had brought her smartphone to her after she dropped it outside. âMy other school, that phone would have been gone,â she said. âItâs the integrity here.â Like many teachers at the targeted schools, she was still waiting for her transfer assignment. âThis was supposed to be my last home,â she said.
And then it was dismissal time. It was school tradition to have the staff come out at the end of every school year and wave at the departing buses as they did two ceremonial loops around the block. Speakers blared music from the back of a pickup, and the teachers danced and waved. âWe love you,â Principal Thomas called out.
It was quieter over at School 29, the school with many special-needs kids. The children were gone, and one teacher, Latoya Crockton-Brown, walked alone to her car. She had spent nineteen years at the school, which will be closing completely. âWeâre not doing well at all,â she said, of herself and her colleagues. âThis was a family school. Itâs very disheartening. Even the children cried today.â
She was wearing a T-shirt that read âForever School 29 / 1965 to Now.â The school had done a lot in recent days to aid the transitionâbringing in a snow-cone truck and a cotton-candy machine, hosting a school dance. âOne girl said she feels like sheâs never going to make friends like she had here,â Crockton-Brown said. âBut we have to move on. We have no other choice.â âŚ
â This Article is a Collaboration Between The New Yorker and ProPublica. ProPublica is a Nonprofit Newsroom that Investigates Abuses of Power. Published in the Print Edition of the September 2, 2024, Issue, with the Headline âThe Last Day.â
#Article#American Chronicles#The New Yorker#ProPublica#âThe Last Dayâ#The Death of School#Declining Enrollment#American Public Education#A Gravely Threath#Alec MacGillis#Alec MacGillis | Reporter | ProPublica | Author âď¸ | âFulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazonâ
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I feel like, when it comes to these things, people often confuse "normalizing the experience" with "confirming that this insane shit did, in fact, happen, and I didn't just imagine it"
Americans love to post shit like "y'all remember being in elementary school and we had to line up in the cafeteria so a cop could put a loaded gun in everyone's mouth"
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"In a historic move Friday [November 8, 2024], Sacramento State announced its new Native American College, a first of its kind in the California State university system.Â
The college, a co-curricular institution housed at Sacramento State, will support Native-based education with a focus on leadership and career building. It will offer a diverse range of programs that integrate "tribal values, traditions and community engagement," according to a press release.Â
This marks Sacramento State's second ethnic-based institution. The university launched the the nation's first Black Honors college earlier this year.Â
The announcement was made at the California State Capitol by President Luke Wood and Dr. Annette Reed, an enrolled member and citizen of the Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation, who will be the first dean of the Native American College.Â
Reed said students will have access to faculty mentors, advisors, outreach coordinators and more who have the expertise to work closely with Native American students and can support them holistically.Â
She hopes this historic initiative will address low enrollment of Native students pursuing higher education across the state and in the country. Native American students face significant barriers to enrolling in higher education, such as financial constraints, feelings of isolation, historical trauma and lack of culturally relevant curriculum.Â
"And so I'm hoping this impacts the students where they go through as a cohort. They can create networks, they can be able to have more of a support system going through and beginning together and hopefully graduating at the end together," Reed said.
Reed recalled taking her first class on Native American studies in 1980. She would later on serve as the director of Native American studies at Sacramento State and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies. For her, advocating for Native American education was a natural top priority.Â
"People always ask me, 'What is Native American studies?' It is history. It is looking at culture. It's looking at teaching sovereignty, federal Indian law. It's teaching social work, art. It's teaching about Native cultural expression, it can be literature," Reed said.Â
The Native American College will introduce two new courses, according to Reed, which will be focused on Native American leadership.Â
"It means that maybe some of the ones that start in Fall 2025 will end up here at the Capitol. Maybe they'll end up being the future senators or assembly people or the future of people in business. They might be leading our nation as tribal chairs, they might be going into the medical field," Reed said. "But whatever field they go into, leadership is really key."Â
Students who want to be in the Native American College can apply after being accepted into the university's general application process. All students will be required to minor in Native American Studies, with an emphasis on Native American leadership."
-via ABC 10, November 8, 2024
#native american#indigenous#indigenous peoples#first nations#sacramento#california#united states#college#university#public education#public university#native american studies#education#education news#good news#hope
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#black republicans#progressive ideas#historical context#modern politics#affirmative action#public financing of education#anti-black worldview#white supremacy#political policies#african american history#political alignment#black leadership#historical black republicans#political dynamics#modern black republicans#political representation#racial dynamics in politics#black political history#republican party#white approval#policy priorities#african american leaders#black conservatives#historical vs modern republicans#black community interests#political shifts#racial justice#political critique
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mark confirmed that the 20k donation from that gamerâs for palestine live stream was him and people are saying, âwell heâs still not talking about itâ, am i the only one who thinks giving 20 thousand dollars directly into palestinian hands is more impactful than making a post on a defunct social media site asking people with less than a hundredth of his net worth to donate in his name?
#weâre past educating the general public now#look at all the protests the fulfilled gofundmes the thousands of names on hundreds of petitions#the people have rallied#its about money and politicians now#acting like hes scum when hes done more for palestinian relief than the entire american government is a bit ridiculous#he didnt pull a lizzo and ask his broke fanbase to donate#he took his own money and gave it to the people who need it#and thats just one donation weâve seen who knows how much else hes given#quite frankly iâll take that over a tweet#markiplier#well thatâs content#marky mark
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#this is why we can't have nice things#woke is wonderful#fight the patriarchy#smash the patriarchy#empathy education#racisim#racists#american horror story#fight peer pressure from the past#fixer upper#prageru#conservatives hold us all back#conservatives are morally bankrupt#conservatives in public#this is what youâre actually saying#saying the quiet part out loud#he really said that#itâs kind of true though#racist America#america#just american things#our notorious history#slavery#our disgraceful history#critical race theory#black lives matter#black history#black stories#blacklivesmatter#black is beautiful
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#toot#toots#mastodon#black history month#black history usa#black history#american racism#racism#brown vs the board of education#us education#public education#education#history#Manufacturing Consent#public school#school
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regarding the âthe american education system didnât teach ___ so i never learned itâ posts, some of you are veryyyy much missing whatâs wrong w/ those statements when you give the blanket retort that the american education system actually did teach ___. newsflash: public school curriculums arenât the same in every school/district/county/state. but to take it a step further, the quality of public education depends on state laws and the funding available to schools, which funding depends largely on local property taxes, which means low-income communities end up with low-quality schooling, fewer extracurricular programs, fewer resources for disabled students, more corrupt administration. the system is not about problems with curriculum, itâs much more and much worse than that.
besides the property tax funding, standardized tests also play a huge shitty role in this mess. schools that donât have high test scores, i.e. underfunded schools often with majority low-income black and brown students, are considered âlow-performingâ and actually get less funding from the government as a result, like needed funds can get cut, and their teachers get paid less (and donât even get me started on how programs like teach for america are sending young, white, fully inexperienced teachers to the poorest schools).
standardized tests are chosen at the state level, so states with huge wealth disparities and obviously segregated districts (like CT where iâm from) are measuring the performance of poor kids and rich kids using the same content and scoring system to arbitrarily determine whoâs smart enough to deserve a better funded education. so the tests, i.e. the government, clearly favor the success of rich, white students. and the problem isnât so much which content gets taught and how, as it is how little the american government actually cares about kids learning and having promising futures. like, education truly isnât the point of american public schools. what they care about is deciding who gets to thrive in the world once they become adults.
since schools with majority white and wealthy populations essentially set the bar for what kind of performance is âstandard,â everyone else whose circumstances (academic or otherwise) donât allow them to reach that level are set up by the system to fail. being a âlow-performingâ school means kids are forced to repeat grades, and graduation becomes something out of reach. the schools donât care about their studentsâ needs (especially when the teachers and administrators are mostly white), and real-life factors beyond studentsâ control cause them to struggle in school and they end up getting punished/suspended/expelled at horrifying rates, and yeah thereâs a whooooole host of reasons why school can fucking suck and iâm barely scratching the surface.
anyway, what iâm trying to say here is YES the american education system sucksânot just because certain topics related to racism and imperialism and american history and other countries are glanced over or fully left out of curriculum, but also because success is being gatekept by the white and wealthy. itâs actively a racist system. not being taught important things about the world, or not being taught in a way that is actually engaging, is a problem that anyone anywhere can face, but itâs particularly insidious when you realize that the school system is TRYING to harm poor, black, brown, and immigrant communities.
so just to circle back to the real problem on display in those ignorant posts, it really makes me sick that white liberals can develop such a whiny complex around their own insular lack of curiosity when they donât even know what âamerican education systemâ theyâre talking about. and trying to look better than them by saying they just werenât paying attention in school is completely completely beside the point.
#how did this end up being mostly about standardized tests đ i wanted to get into state laws but it was already way too long#SORRY if this is all obvious or common knowledge. itâs reallyyyy hard to tell how much my fellow white americans know abt our own schools#public school#american education system#systemic racism#education
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#public schools#private schools#funding#budget#budgets#budgeting#education#America#american education system#education system#school#kids#children#youth#educators#government funding#local government#state government#federal government#education is important#fund education#reality#politics#democrats#republicans#independent#capitalism#political games#kentucky#andy beshear
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Me and my high school buddies had this conversation last year but:
The school system hasnât left not one neurodivergent kid untraumatized. Usually in elementary school too like goddamn.
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The most annoying phenomena on this website is grown adults refusing to educate themselves, despite the abundant recourses at their disposal, because their heads are still stuck in highschool.
#simon says#this always bugs me like okay school failed you. you're 29. i think you've had enough time to move on and learn.#you're surrounded by abundant resources to educate yourself and you're choosing to cry about school rather than using any of them#like yeah. thinking critically and reading and learning are skills#you have to practice and refine them over time#but if you keep just blaming the american school system and not do any of the world refining those skills#it just makes you look really really like... silly. im gonna be honest.#like you're not even trying to do anything to fix the issue you're just complaining about the issue#which is a common theme I notice on tumblr of course but holy shit does this topic really make people more ignorant by the second#even just ignoring the fact that you're currently on the world wide web and have access to nearly every single corner of the world#america literally has public libraries. that are there to educate you.#you can literally just go in and ask a librarian to help you find a book on a topic#im sorry this is just one of those topics I cannot comprehend#idk if it's an autism 'learned how to research at an early age' thing or what#but I cannot comprehend that people refuse to simply search something simple and read the first 3 or 4 webpages about it#like huh??? wuh????#moments like this really make me think that i actually should have went to college for that English degree
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Africa is a continent of more than 50 countries, and home to thousands of languages and cultures. Africans lived in complex societies, from small villages to large bustling cities, that contained universities, mosques, and libraries.
Africa has great civilizations that flourished in Africa included Egypt, Kush, Axum, Mali and Great Zimbabwe.
Africa's history is complex and stretches back through centuries of dynasties. Africa contributed to our knowledge and understanding of ancient writings, languages, agriculture and engineering. Its extensive trade system connected the continent with Asia and India, producing a lively exchange of goods such as grains, metals, and gold.
Black History instruction in K-12 education, 65% of the 401 educators interviewed said that their state does not mandate Black History instruction. Only 12 states require some form of Black history curriculum.
Africans were free before they were enslaved. Enslaved Africans relied on their knowledge and beliefs to survive slavery, and their contributions to U.S. culture, society, and economy are evident in every aspect of American life and enterprise. Agriculture, music, art, and culinary.
#history#african history#african american#education#Africa#axum#mali empire#great Zimbabwe#world history#public school#ancient
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Public education is not actually about academia, it's about industry. The purpose of american schools, from day one, was to integrate members of the general people into a society that is nigh dependant on submission to the status quo. If you ask any teacher, student, parent, counselor, or any other person who is invested in public schooling, what the purpose of going to school is, they will respond with some variation on how it's meant to prepare kids for their future careers. What's important is not that one is in touch with their history, or able to perform basic mathematics, or that one can engage with literature and art in a meaningful way. The important part is that schoolchildren have a dispassionately earnest work ethic, an unyieldingly flexible standard of punctuality, and an uncompromising set of inordinate values about properness drilled into them. I don't think it's funny or ironic that school settings are commonly compared to prisons, and I don't think education should have to exist to serve the purpose of monetary and political benefit to be considered worthy of investment. Until public education as an institution is no longer viewed as an extension of industry, intellectualism will never thrive and no number of foundational reworks of the system will be effective at remedying the underlying cause of dysfunction and corruption.
#exilley's diary#education#public education#school system#american school system#schools#apologies for the u.s. cnetric post but i felt it needed to be said#the correct argument for educational reform is not ''current structures perpeuate existing societal inequalities''#but ''the current system is built by capitalists of capitalists for capitalists and that is ethically repulsive''#reform
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I want to be so many things at once like i want to be a historian and an author and an artist and a poet and a journalist and an activist and a psychologist and instead i'm in the fucking american public high school system
#history#historian#author#writing#literature#poet#poetry#poem#journalism#journalist#activism#activist#psychology#psychologist#clinical psychology#clinical psychologist#neurology#neurologist#behavioral psychology#behavioral psychologist#america#american#high school#highschool#public high school#american public school#fuck the usa#fuck the american education system#fuck the us education system#fuck the us government
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can russia and north korea just nuke us already this is hopeless
#sorry to be so fatalistic on main i just have zero faith in the american public atp#i just rly wanted to believe that more americans couldve used this opportunity to prove to the rest of the world that we arent all a bunch#of sensationalist/conspiracy-driven/aggressively braindead/violent/bigoted alt-right lunatics#& i never had much faith in kamala & walz to begin with obviously im incredibly cynical towards these status quo gatekeepers and the#downright impotence of the neoliberal democratic party#but this wouldve been an easy swerve away from dozens MORE of horrible awful inhumane policies that will ultimately vanquish#the quality of life for the entire american working class like myself and our already pisspoor education system and our lousy#climate change policies and impossible living standards#but no unfortunately there is no way in hell for americans to prove even a modicum of intelligence or worth we're all basically suicidal#and despite my own immense yank bashing tendencies and complete disdain for our government i really wanted this country & my ppl to defy#our own reputation of being so fucking stupid and backwards i really did. in the tiniest little place of my heart was legitimate hope#& a tiny bit of patriotism thats now been squashed completely & this was just another large-scale international humiliation that we legit#voted that guy BACK IN after everything that has happened the last four even eight years. its unbelievable.#again obviously i dont like kamala but it still wouldve been a grand opportunity to stall against what the gop is already destroying#and with push and shove we could have made slight progress forward as a country and try to protect our social programs#be it as flawed as they are and with enough support we could have strengthened them a little. make drugs less expensive. continue forward#with clean energy decreasing our use of fossil fuels even more.#protect our education system so the up and coming generations could receive higher standards of learning than what the rest of us had#NO ABSOLUTELY NOT. im too poor to continue living here and im too poor to fucking leave !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#SORRY THIS WAS EXTREMELY EXTREMELY EXTREMELY LONG THANK U FOR READING IF U DID MY BRAIN FEELS LIKE MUSH RIGHT NOW SO I DONT KNOW HOW#INTELLIGIBLE THIS MAY OR MAY NOT BE#and if this makes anyone mad @ all then ill just delete it cuz by god i dont need more grief and self hatred !#txt
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