ok, I might be a little bit conceded and will probably have some of you all disagreeing with me……
On page 194, Kozol speaks of a booklet by the Education Secretary William Bennett “What Works” which references 41 attributes of a successful school. These included the items “memorization of historical dates” “consistent ‘enforcement‘ of discipline” and “continuous assessment”. These items seem more like something that would have been useful in a jail. Memorization of the dates could be related to remembering a prison ID number or when at what the prisoner is being held for. The consistent enforcement of discipline brings to mind the guards with asp sticks, ready to use on any prisoners that are threatening to the environment. Lastly, the continuous assessment could be related to the prisoners having to constantly have their room “mind” searched. I feel that when we prohibit students to be creative, thats where the learning process stops. Here’s my extremely controversial view on history, it’s already in the books. Don’t get me wrong, I think history is extremely important and we cannot know where we are going when we do not know the past, but I feel that we have fallen into this circle of teaching only what we were taught. I went through elementary school being told that Rosa Parks was just a little old lady who did not want to give up her seat on the bus, it was not until I came to college that I learned that she actually worked for the NAACP! Why was this left out of our books and why were we not told this? Is this the “creative history” or “choice history” that we are just supposed to keep passing down until we lose the actual “truthiness” of what happened in the past. Then we test the students on these “facts” that are not true! There is always a new way to “save our schools” but it is rare that anyone is actually trying to implement something that is proven to work, i.e. Mr. Esquith.
The next chapter was really upsetting when describing the situation of disarray of some of these schools. The administration is not doing all that it can to save some of these schools from disappearing into the void of last percentile, but is busing all of the smart kids to the school to raise scores the answer? Putting that money into the school and teachers seems like a more long term solution to me than raising the test scores one year. It takes alot of thought to sit in the office and think of ways to save schools as a whole, but maybe we should look at this thing school by school.
