#education in America

[dr-archeville]

So earlier this week I was at a meeting on AI in the Classroom.  One thing in particular that the speaker said has been sticking with me.

I'm paraphrasing, but it was basically "My child just entered high school.  He's autistic, but you wouldn't know to look at him.  He's got great social skills.  But his reading skills are stuck at a 1st grade level.  I'd like to see all the reading goals removed from his IEP, because I'm almost certain he'd never meet them, and instead want them to focus on teaching him to use Generative AI.  Because that's the more important skill."

... wat?

[teacherfromthegreenlagoon]

Parent-teacher conferences are always good for finding out which of my students plays fast and loose with the truth. But. Students are my new school are next level.

One of my students told me that their parent had assigned them a research project on the same topic as what we're studying. I say, cool! You can present it in class when you're done.

Tonight, their parent sits down at my table and says, "We gotta talk about this project you assigned my kid. It is stressing them out. They're spending hours working on it. They have no idea how to cite their sources. What exactly are your expectations?"

Y'all. This kid. This kid assigned themselves a research project FOR FUN, and then LIED to both me and their parent about it! And when we confronted them, they 100% tried to throw me under the bus.

Anyway, I love this kid and their parent and this school. I'm never leaving.

[reasoningdaily]

Black students being “bused” to integrated schools, circa 1970. Photo: Denver Post

Friday was the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education that formally struck down state-enforced racial segregation of public schools as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. An assessment of Brown’s legacy in the Washington Post, based on new public opinion research, made three salient points on how people view its impact today: (1) Retroactive support for the basic holding in this decision is at an all-time high; but (2) many Black Americans are disappointed by the educational benefits of desegregation; and (3) “large segments of the White population oppose strategies that would help make [integration] a reality.” Anyone with a good memory of the fraught history of conflict over desegregation knows that Black disappointment owes a lot to white resistance.

In reality, the full implementation of Brown has been hampered by wave after wave of what came to be known as “white flight”: first from integrated schools and then from public education itself. But even before that happened, the impact of Brown was frustrated by a proviso in the decision itself that desegregation should be dismantled “with all deliberate speed.” This was an amber light that gave southern proprietors of the “separate but equal” school systems Brown theoretically condemned abundant time to challenge more specific measures in the courts and in general drag their feet. This is why over a decade after the decision, I was attending an all-white public high school in majority-Black Atlanta, Georgia.

Eventually, desegregation occurred even in the Jim Crow South, but that didn’t mean actual integration. Even in multiracial jurisdictions, “neighborhood schools” tracking segregated-housing patterns provided one way of escape for white students whose parents didn’t want them in classes with Black peers. But as urban areas outstripped the boundaries of core cities, the ability to reconstruct majority- or even all-white schools in suburbs was a significant factor in “white flight” that perpetuated both residential and school segregation. The controversy over “busing” to overcome “white flight” by overriding school-district boundaries, as federal courts dictated in many urban areas around the country, dominated the politics of education in the 1970s and 1980s. A whole generation of white politicians in both parties — including, famously, the current president of the United States — cut their teeth on “anti-busing” movements, and by the end of the 1990s, the very federal courts that created “busing” threw in the towel and put an end to it.

But long before busing rose and fell, a second and more invidious strategy for fighting school integration was born in mostly rural southern counties with unitary public-school systems that couldn’t be resegregated by school-district or political boundaries: “white flight” from public education altogether. Born in the 1950s when segregationist pols flirted with closing public schools altogether rather than integrating them, white communities and their churches sponsored pop-up private schools, often quite inexpensive, that were universally and accurately known as “segregation academies.” In 1976 in a landmark decision nearly as important as Brown, SCOTUS ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned racial discrimination in private-school admissions. It was so heated a controversy that most historians now believe the threat to segregated church-sponsored schools (including colleges and universities) rather than legalized abortion was the genesis of what came to be known as the Christian right.

Though overtly racist public or private schools became unavailable by the end of the 1970s, white flight from public schools continued, usually accompanied by efforts to give private (and again, often church-sponsored) schools tax subsidies that in effect made them publicly sponsored private schools following religious doctrines and serving a select (and usually majority-white and middle-to-upper-class) clientele. Various and increasingly widespread experiments with private-school “vouchers” have been embraced by Republicans (and, to a more limited extent, by some Democrats) in the 21st century. Most recently, individualizing school subsidies has been a frequent by-product of the conservative “parental rights” movement in education, in which the very idea of public schools as a means of promoting racial, economic, or social equality is under attack. And while some school-voucher programs are marketed as a boon to Black students “trapped” in underfunded public schools, the historical record is that they ultimately produce racially and economically stratified instruction by taking the “public” out of public schools altogether.

The bottom line is that realization of the dream of an integrated public-school system has been frustrated by decades of delays, evasions, and outright opposition stemming from white political resistance — a resistance increasingly championed by today’s Republican Party as part of its pervasive Trump-driven mission of bringing back the “greatness” of America as it existed before the 1960s came along and spoiled everything. Perhaps the vision represented by Brown was always naïve, and the strategies adopted by courts and schools to implement it were sometimes ham-handed or even counterproductive. But just accepting segregated schools is inimical to civic and religious values much older than a 70-year-old Supreme Court decision. Marking 70 Years of White Flight From School Integration

[jccheapalier]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DF0gtfPOs5E/?igsh=MTJjbnN4YWhteXA5Ng==

[ecoamerica]

Watch the 2024 American Climate Leadership Awards for High School Students now: https://youtu.be/5C-bb9PoRLc

The recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by student climate leaders! Join Aishah-Nyeta Brown & Jerome Foster II and be inspired by student climate leaders as we recognize the High School Student finalists. Watch now to find out which student received the $25,000 grand prize and top recognition!

[platonicpolycule]

thanks studentaid.gov glad to know that's an option

[dr-archeville]

Hunh. I've yet to see this, but maybe I'm not looking hard enough...

one fun thing about being a teacher in march 2023 is that chess is a literal epidemic among teens. we are starting to have meetings about how we can STOP teenagers from playing too much chess which is like if we were trying to figure out how to stop them from reading for fun. When i was in high school five years ago chess was nerd shit only but now it is transcending every social and language barrier and is absolutely rampant. kids aren’t on their phone texting in class anymore it’s ONLY chess.com. kids are playing chess on their phones while playing chess in real life. this is still better than tiktok because at least the kids are developing an attention span from this

[sunbeamedskies]

The left SUCKS at recruiting people. And so many of you are part of the problem.

The talk about centrists and moderates being the literal devil I see constantly in online leftist spaces is one great example of the left's failure. Yes, it sucks when the people don't see how horrible the right is. But centrists are some of the most open people to discussion- and some already lean left!!

You can't demonize moderates to such an extent that you close yourself off to them and then wonder why you're losing swing states.

Centrists aren't even always people with all the privileges- you will find plenty of people who are part of marginalized groups who are concerned about politicians on all sides.

You can be a smol radical leftist bean all you want who only talks to other smol socialist and communist beans, but you're never going to make the difference you want to in the world that way. It's the cold, hard truth. It doesn't mean you have to engage in discourse with everyone- some people have no real hope of changing and are emotionally draining- just more than your bubble.

I am tired of the left eating itself alive and deranged people like Trump winning.

[dr-archeville]

Homeschooling: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [source]

"John Oliver discusses homeschooling, its surprising lack of regulation in many states, and, crucially, Darth Vader’s parenting skills." [24 min 24 sec]

[teacherfromthegreenlagoon]

The Wellness teacher at my new school is very adamant that what he teaches is Physical Education, NOT gym.

He is very aware of the trauma students have experienced in gym. He is very aware of the stereotypes and history of gym class and gym teachers. He wants to teach the kids good excercise habits, teamwork and sportsmanship, proper form and how to avoid injuries, and just general skills that they can use later in life.

I honestly don't understand why more PhyEd teachers aren't like him. He even got me to make fitness goals, and I didn't even realize what he was up to until after I'd agreed to it.

[reasonsforhope]

"Buried among Florida’s manicured golf courses and sprawling suburbs are the artifacts of its slave-holding past: the long-lost cemeteries of enslaved people, the statues of Confederate soldiers that still stand watch over town squares, the old plantations turned into modern subdivisions that bear the same name. But many students aren’t learning that kind of Black history in Florida classrooms.

In an old wooden bungalow in Delray Beach, Charlene Farrington and her staff gather groups of teenagers on Saturday mornings to teach them lessons she worries that public schools won’t provide. They talk about South Florida’s Caribbean roots, the state’s dark history of lynchings, how segregation still shapes the landscape and how grassroots activists mobilized the Civil Rights Movement to upend generations of oppression.

“You need to know how it happened before so you can decide how you want it to happen again,” she told her students as they sat as their desks, the morning light illuminating historic photographs on the walls.

Florida students are giving up their Saturday mornings to learn about African American history at the Spady Cultural Heritage Museum in Delray Beach and in similar programs at community centers across the state. Many are supported by Black churches, which for generations have helped forge the cultural and political identity of their parishioners.

Since Faith in Florida developed its own Black history toolkit last year, more than 400 congregations have pledged to teach the lessons, the advocacy group says.

Florida has required public schools to teach African American history for the past 30 years, but many families no longer trust the state’s education system to adequately address the subject.

By the state’s own metrics, just a dozen Florida school districts have demonstrated excellence at teaching Black history, by providing evidence that they are incorporating the content into lessons throughout the school year and getting buy-in from the school board and community partners.

School district officials across Florida told The Associated Press that they are still following the state mandate to teach about the experience of enslavement, abolition and the “vital contributions of African Americans to build and strengthen American society.”

But a common complaint from students and parents is that the instruction seems limited to heroic figures such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and rarely extends beyond each February’s Black History Month.

When Sulaya Williams’ eldest child started school, she couldn’t find the comprehensive instruction she wanted for him in their area. So in 2016, she launched her own organization to teach Black history in community settings.

“We wanted to make sure that our children knew our stories, to be able to pass down to their children,” Williams said.

Williams now has a contract to teach Saturday school at a public library in Fort Lauderdale, and her 12-year-old daughter Addah Gordon invites her classmates to join her.

“It feels like I’m really learning my culture. Like I’m learning what my ancestors did,” Addah said. “And most people don’t know what they did.”"

-via AP News, December 23, 2024

[americanmarketplace]

Time for a reminder: We are a (CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC) NOT A DEMOCRACY LET IT SINK IN !!!!!!

[reality-detective]

Unbelievable 🤔

[kinorabee]

it's low-key terrifying that massachusetts has the best education system in the u.s. because it is NOT good here

[one-time-i-dreamt]

There was a new Mario Party game meant purely to insult the American education system

[helpimanfamily11]

‏Hi everyone, I am sharing to ask for your support. Please press all the buttons and gift if you can. 🙏🏽🚨🔁

Please help us reblog.🔁🚨🚨🙏🙏🫂🫂🍉🍉🔁