Are American schools failing or pretty dang fabulous? Better than we know, or worse than we hope? In recent years, there’s been a push to answer such questions with data, studies, and let’s face it, endless arguments between adults who make a living having opinions about this stuff. In the maelstrom of invective and statistics that has come to define the battle over American education, Amanda Ripley’s book The Smartest Kids in the World enters the fray with a rare equipoise. She looks at test scores that show American students lagging behind students in many high-performing nations, then asks a simple question: Why are some countries doing so much better than the U.S. on international tests — and what’s different about their schools?
To find the human thread of experience in her story, Ripley leaves behind the think tanks and education departments, and enlists the people who experience schools on a daily basis: the kids themselves. She follows three American teens as they participate in exchange programs in South Korea, Finland, and Poland, then uses their insights to hold up a mirror to American education — revealing all its peculiarities, challenges, and potential. read 10 questions for Amanda Ripley here
Institutional racism can be hard to spot. Sometimes it's obvious. In Wilcox County, Ga.—where proms historically have been privately funded and casually labeled “black prom” and “white prom”—efforts to bring black and white students together for the biggest dance of their high school career raised both awareness and long-simmering tensions. Some 30 years after desegregation, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, in an email sent to the media by his spokesperson, labeled these efforts toward integration a “silly publicity stunt.”
And sometimes it’s less obvious, more insidious. Long-standing and long-accepted patterns mean harsher discipline for students of color compared with their white counterparts—in every region of the United States. Expectations are lowered for students on the bottom of the achievement gap. Institutional racism exists throughout society and our schools—public, private, small, large, mono- or multicultural. None is immune to it.
“It can happen at the classroom level, the administrative level or the district level,” says Matthew Lynch, chair and associate professor of education at Langston University in Langston, Okla. “It involves academic achievement, patterns of discipline, professional development—or the lack of it. Really, it can affect almost any aspect of the K-12 experience.”
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So the question arises: Is my school racist?
There’s no one-size-fits-all response to that question, no magic checklist or formula to answer it or, more important, to bring about needed change. But some approaches to identifying and mounting a response to institutional racism in schools are increasingly accepted as best practices. read the full article here
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