In A Nutshell
I'm feeling misunderstood, so I'll take another swing.
Here are these data you show to this room full of people, surely not the only room you've shown them to. My thing is, what's the point? What do we do with this?
Do teachers need to utilize more culturally responsive pedagogy? (Banks et al) Do kids and families of group X need to start acting more like the kids and families from group Y, and like, y'know, get their act together? (Cosby & the staff lounge) Do we put our efforts into wide-scale social transformation, because schools are not powerful enough to overcome such a pervasive inequity? (Rothstein) Do we stop talking about poverty, because it's not about poverty, but about innate factors out of our control? (silly race-based IQ-gap people)
Or do we say, here is School A which has the same demographics as School B, but kids at School A learn and those at School B do not -- just why is that exactly? (Folks who scribble the word educator in front of every published utterance of the phrase "achievement gap.")
That's my thing. Don't engage an endless debate that may or may not get us closer to bringing a better education to more kids.
Here are these data you show to this room full of people, surely not the only room you've shown them to. My thing is, what's the point? What do we do with this?
Do teachers need to utilize more culturally responsive pedagogy? (Banks et al) Do kids and families of group X need to start acting more like the kids and families from group Y, and like, y'know, get their act together? (Cosby & the staff lounge) Do we put our efforts into wide-scale social transformation, because schools are not powerful enough to overcome such a pervasive inequity? (Rothstein) Do we stop talking about poverty, because it's not about poverty, but about innate factors out of our control? (silly race-based IQ-gap people)
Or do we say, here is School A which has the same demographics as School B, but kids at School A learn and those at School B do not -- just why is that exactly? (Folks who scribble the word educator in front of every published utterance of the phrase "achievement gap.")
That's my thing. Don't engage an endless debate that may or may not get us closer to bringing a better education to more kids.
posted by Kilian Betlach at 7:55 PM
1 Comments:
From the outside, I think it's hard for folks to always be able to tell the difference between the "use more culturally responsive pedagogy" and the "educator achievement gap" camps.
Do you think the specific behavioral changes that teachers need to make in order to close this gap differ widely from individual to individual?
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