Search Results for "poverty"
Universal Education is an Investment in Our Future
Published November 19, 2009 @ 03:54PM PT
This is a guest-post from the Education & Gender Equality team at UNICEF.
Question: What do the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Convention of the Rights of the Child have in common? Answer: They both celebrate 20 years this November 2009.
The Convention on the Right of the Child is slowly reaching its majority. Since the adoption of the Convention in 1989, many things in the world have changed, the Berlin wall fell as did child mortality in many places around the world. The Convention has supported measurable advances in child survival and development, raised awareness of and expanded solutions to child protection risks and promoted child participation as a fundamental right of children.
Despite great advances, young people today face increasing challenges that require them to be more creative, adaptable and resilient than ever before. Poverty, climate change, conflicts and natural disasters, along with the economic crisis, call for more sustainable solutions. In 2007, 101 million children of primary school age – 53 million girls and 48 million boys – were not attending school. Universal primary education is a particular challenge in sub-Saharan Africa, where 46 million children were out of school in 2007, and South Asia, with 35 million out of school that same year. Education is thus the key to solving many of the problems of the global community. A relevant, quality education will ensure that these children become individuals who reach their full potential.
Rural Brain Drain Threatens Small Towns, Those Left Behind
Published September 24, 2009 @ 04:29PM PT
The brain drain out of rural America has had terrible consequences for small towns, with urban problems now blighting the countryside. Whilst not a new phenomenon, the Chronicle explain that it is reach a tipping point, with too many talented young people leaving. It's a problem "every time a college-educated twenty-something on the verge of becoming a worker, taxpayer, homeowner, or parent leaves."
So who's to blame? Results-driven schools may be neglecting and under-investing in lower-achieving students who are more likely to stay, whilst high-fliers—the brightest and best—are focused on, encouraged to leave, and go off to college. Those who stay, having been neglected, are doomed too often to downward social mobility and poverty. Sociologists Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas continue by explaining that the solution may be to equalize education investments, and put more money into post high-school education and community colleges.
Of course, it works the other way too: The National Wildlife Foundation is highlighting the variety of ways that fieldtrips can teach students everything from nutrition to motivation and even reduce attention deficit disorder. Rural America does have some things on its side, now it needs more people to fight its corner.
[Photo credit: newagecrap]
Turnaround Strategies & the President's Back-To-School Message
Published September 08, 2009 @ 05:46AM PT
Turnaround strategies for the lowest performing schools are one of the major focuses of the economic stimulus program for education. At the end of August Arne Duncan announced that in order to end cycles of poverty and social failure "we must address the needs of children who have long been ignored and marginalized in chronically low-achieving schools." $3 billion to fund new resources and improve teaching quality will come from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with money only going to schools that support "rigorous intervention" and promise "rapid improvements." Duncan certainly favors dramatic turnaround policies, as his support for the Race To The Top program indicates — a program targeting high-quality, rather than failing schools.
This is all happening as Barack Obama is set to address students in a back-to-school address that emphasizes an investment of responsibility: By government, by teachers, and by students:
...at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.
At almost 2,500 words, it's a lot for students to sit to take in, but he know it's not just the kids listening:
Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need ... I'm working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn.
[Photo credit: Changedotgov]
Still a Shared Journey: Education 1960’s Style
Published September 03, 2009 @ 08:03AM PT
One thing for sure –when folks attend a high school reunion, it’s the one place where no one has to guess how old anyone else is. I recently attended my high school reunion, and it was more fun than I could have imagined! The icebreaker was walking up to someone and saying, “And who are you?” We never knew that we would ever not recognize people we spent twelve formative years with and whose features we knew so well.
This was the class of 1967, Kosciusko High School, in Mississippi. As we gathered and talked, I reflected a great deal about the public education we got there together. There were no accountability measures, state-mandated standards, or state assessments. There was nothing like No Child Left Behind legislation. We just went to school and got our education. And seeing my classmates and what they have done with their lives, it must not have been such a bad education at that. While I realize the many differences and challenges in American schools today and fully understand the accountability system, I see in our education some of the components that have become lost in today’s schools – and that parents very much want to get back.
Together we reflected on our education and our teachers …mostly smart, mostly women, and completely committed to our academic success. This was, after all, still the era in which women’s options for careers were limited. The teaching profession was a viable option that attracted the best and brightest women. One classmate referenced a teacher who allowed him to come back when he was in college and get help with his work. Even decades prior to NCLB, we got all of our basic skills, and most went on to higher levels. We studied history, the classics, English, geometry, trigonometry, French, and other subjects, and we had varied musical opportunities – both choirs and band. We did term papers and researched from encyclopedias and books – not search engines and the internet. In addition, we had a full array of other opportunities –athletic, extra-curricular, drama, and social.
New Yorker Podcasts, Profiting from Poverty, and Casting Stones at Gays
Published June 03, 2009 @ 12:12AM PT
Some good links from around the web this week.
Dana Goldstein at The Nation: "Selling School Reform." -- How Obama, Duncan, and Democrats for Education Reform are giving education to the Wall Street types. (After all, there's good money to be made in the poverty trade.) Ohanion seems unnecessarily harsh on Goldstein in her prefatory comments.
Fiction podcasts from the New Yorker. Great short stories read by great authors. I can see a million classroom uses, beyond the pure pleasure.
Betty Bowers is without sin, so she casts stones freely: See her latest video explaining traditional marriage to everyone else. (Not educational, beyond the critical reading of an authoritative text and the fine example of satire - call her a female Stephen Colbert, maybe.)
Arne Duncan's Tall Chicago Tales: Education Policy Blog gives "A look at Chicago schools under Duncan." Coming soon to a blighted and soon-to-be-outsourced neighborhood near you. (More de-mythologizing Duncan's turnaround "successes" here.)
CBS radio coverage of Tiananmen Square is one of hundreds of rich a/v resources at Crooks and Liars growing "Newstalgia" archives. History, politics, media studies teachers will love it.
War-gaming North Korea: Wired's link-rich feature on the possible consequences of a U.S. war with North Korea. (I arrived in Seoul the very week that Pyongyang detonated its first nuke three summers ago. I'm leaving now as it's getting even more batsh!t - and not without reason, frankly, though you won't hear that on CNN. Provoking renewed conflict could bloody this place up bad. It's an ugly situation - and the readings would be great for current events teachers.)
It's moving week, folks. Packing up the stuff for shipment to Singapore, preparing for a month of couch-surfing until we fly out - unless the commies invade first.
Action: Support Education - Tell the Senate not to Sell Out on Health Care Reform
Published May 10, 2009 @ 12:48AM PT
President Obama and Arne Duncan like to compare U.S. education - unfavorably, typically - to that of Korea, where I currently live. Here's an educational comparison they don't share: the number of uninsured people in America is roughly equal to the entire population of Korea, where all 50 million Koreans are covered by national health care.
Maybe, just maybe, health insurance for all is a factor in those dazzling Korean test scores. Maybe the tough love our education "reformers" urge we show toward our underprivileged students should be shown also to our vested health care interests, their lobbying millions be damned.
* * *
One of the unfortunate effects of the departmentalization of knowledge in schools - you know, history is separate from literature, science from math, on and on - is that it conditions us to think "inside the lanes," instead of see the connections across them. Reality is more complex than that.
If you agree, then you'll understand this: One of the best ways you can help improve public education and erase the achievement gap is to push for affordable health care for all.
The Senate Armed Finance Committee certainly isn't pushing for it for us - maybe because its chair, Montana Sen. Max Baucus, has taken more money from the health insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies than any other Democrat in Congress, and is excluding single-payer advocates from ongoing health care reform roundtable talks.
Ed Schultz does a great job of reporting on this one. Please watch, then go to this action to petition Baucus to let doctors and the majority of the American public have a seat at the table:
. Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
.
Do I have to say anything more than that healthy parents and children are likely to learn better than unhealthy ones? And that making health care accessible and affordable to the more than 45.7 million uninsured Americans - and the millions more who are underinsured - will create more healthy parents and children?
Timothy Foley at the Change.org Health Care blog has been doing great coverage on the growing congressional sell-out of our best chance for true health care reform in a decade. I hope you're following it. Bernie Horn of the Campaign for America's Future has more here.
And again, I hope you'll sign Timothy's petition to Baucus. Time's running out.
Still Separate, Still Unequal? (The Case of Special Education)
Published July 28, 2009 @ 10:17AM PT
[This is Part 2 in a series on race, schooling and educational opportunities. Part 1 can be found here]
Fifty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court declared that providing “separate but equal” educational opportunities to students based on race denied students of color the equal protection of the law. Largely, the holding in the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education has been examined with respect to equity of access to the institution of schooling generally. And, while much of the progress that was achieved by eliminating legally enforced (de jure) school segregation has been erased by de facto housing segregation patterns that beget de facto school segregation, it is also clear that students of color continue to be denied equal educational opportunities within the institution of schooling. That is, while the post-Brown focus was and continues to be between-school and between-district segregation by race, more subtle forms of racial discrimination have persisted and proliferated within schools and districts, even in the most “integrated” schools and districts.
As one example of this “within-school” racial segregation, consider the disproportionate number of students of color classified as special needs students. The Twenty-Second Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2000) documents the extent and seriousness of the problem:
- African-American youth, ages 6 through 21, account for 14.8 percent of the general population. Yet, they account for 20.2 percent of the special education population.
- In 10 of the 13 disability categories, the percentage of African-American students equals or exceeds the resident population percentage.
- The representation of African-American students in the mental retardation and developmental delay categories is more than twice their national population estimates.
Those are the simplest ways to understand the problem. There are, however, other more refined ways of "measuring" disproportionality. The National Research Council's Committee on Minority Representation in Special Education, in a widely cited report, offers three such measures:
- The risk index (RI) is calculated by dividing the number of students of a particular race served in a particular disability category by the total enrollment of students of the given race in the school population. In other words, the “risk index” is the percentage of all students of a particular racial group identified in a particular disability category.
- The odds ratio (OR) is computed by dividing the risk index of a given racial group by the risk index of another racial group. Typically, odds ratios are reported relative to white students. In that case, if the risk index for a given racial group is identical to white students, the odds ratio will equal 1.0. Odds ratios greater than 1.0 means that students in the given racial group are at greater risk for identification, while odds ratios of less than 1.0 indicate that they are less at risk.
- The composition index (CI) is calculated by dividing the number of students of a particular racial group enrolled in a particular disability category by the total number of students enrolled in that same disability category. In other words, the CI indicates the proportion of all children served under a given disability category who are members of a given racial/ethnic group.
The following table comes from the National Research Council report. The data indicate significant overrepresentation of African-American students in the emotional disturbance category. In 1998, African-American students were 59% more likely to be identified as emotionally disturbed than Caucasian students.
As evidenced above, much of the data used in reports or studies on the issue of racial disproportionality in special education are fairly old. It is not uncommon to see relatively recent articles reporting on data from 5-10 years prior. However, some of the most recent data are maintained by the Equity Alliance at Arizona State University. Through their partnerships with the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI) and the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt), they offer a powerful data visualization application where, across cities and states, special education data can be examined with respect to the distributions of students with disabilities across various disability categories by ethnic/racial category. Using that service, examining my the state in which I currently reside (Virginia), I produced a graph that shows the risk index/ratio for African-American students across all disabilities over time. The graph shows that, relative to Caucasian students and relative to all other races, African-American students are significantly more likely to be identified with a disability; the risk-ratio increased every year from 2001-2007. As of 2007, in the state of Virginia, African-American students were 54% more likely to be identified as disabled than other students.
Poverty is often cited as an explanation for these disparities. However, while poverty and related factors correlate highly with the incidence of disability, the effects of gender and race remain significant even after controlling for socioeconomics. Furthermore, and most striking, according to the NAACP (2001), “and contrary to the expectations, is the finding that the risk for being labeled ‘mentally retarded’ increases for blacks attending schools in districts serving mostly middle-class or wealthy white students” (p. 18). In fact, Losen and Orfield (2002) tell us that African-American children, and especially males, are at increased risk for mental retardation and emotional disturbance identification as the white population of a district increases. In other words, even and especially where African-American youth have achieved integration, they are disproportionately labeled and excluded from the general education setting.
The data on the overrepresentation of students of color in special education present a prima facie problem. Efforts to address the problem have been codified. According to this document produced last month by the U.S. Department of Education:
IDEA requires States and LEAs to take steps to address disproportionate representation of racial/ethnic groups in special education. 20 U.S.C. 1416(a)(3)(C); 34 CFR §300.600(d)(3)...States have a separate obligation, under 20 U.S.C. 1418(d) and 34 CFR §300.646, to collect and examine data to determine whether significant disproportionality based on race and ethnicity is occurring in the State and LEAs of the State with respect to the identification of children as children with disabilities, including identification as children with particular impairments; the placement of children in particular educational settings; and the incidence, duration, and type of disciplinary actions, including suspensions and expulsions.
In other words, this problem has been identified and is finally being addressed in the educational policy arena. The extant research identifies the "disproportionate representation problem as a complex social process of intricate interactions among multiple determinant factors" (Mooney, 2007). Thus, whether the policy approaches to remedying the problem prove effective is still an empirical question at this point.
***************************
SELECTED REFERENCES
- Artiles, A. J., & Trent, S.C. (2000). Representations of culturally/linguistically diverse students. In C. R. Reynolds, & E. Fletcher-Janzen (Eds), Encyclopedia of Special Education, (2nd ed. , Vol. 1, pp. 513-517). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
- Coutinho, M. J., Oswald, D.P., & Best A. M. (2002). The influence of sociodemographics and gender on the disproportionate identification of minority students as having learning disabilities. Remedial and Special Education, 23 (1), 49-59.
- Hosp, J., & Reschly, D. (2002). Predictors of restrictiveness of placement for African-American and Caucasian students. Exceptional Children, 68 (2), 225-238.
- Ladner, M., & Hammons, C. (2001). Special but unequal: Race and special education. In C.E. Finn, A. J. Rotherham, & C. R. Hokanson Jr. (Eds.), Rethinking special education for a new century (pp. 85-110). Thomas B. Fordham Foundation & The Progressive Policy Institute.
- Losen, D.J. & Orfield, G. (2002). Racial Inequity in Special Education. Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and the Harvard Education Press.
- Mooney, K. (2007) An Historical Case Study of the Intersection between Policy and Practice in One School District: Untangling the Disproportionate Representation of Students of Color in Special Education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Hofstra University. Hempstead, NY.
- NAACP Education Department (2001). NAACP call for action in education. Baltimore, MD: NAACP Education Department. Retrieved on February 24, 2002 from http://naacp.org/about/resources/publications/education_call_to_actn_2.pdf.
- National Research Council (2002). Minority students in special education and gifted education. Washington D.C.: National Academic Press.
- U.S. Department of Education (2000). Twenty second annual report to Congress on the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
- Zhang, D. & Katsiyannis, A. (2002). Minority representation in special education: A persistent challenge. Remedial and Special Education, 22, 180-87.
