Literacy with an attitude (corniest title of a book ever)

This week’s reading really affected me and made me really want to either get into the class room or find a way of changing educational policies in this country. It made me think very deeply about social class and how the language and the approaches to education are really meant to keep the status quo in check. The author relied heavily on the influences of Brazilian scholar and educator Paulo Freire. Paulo Freire in the 1960 started an adult literacy program for Brazil’s illiterate poor. Freire believed that the way that literacy was being taught to this group of people needed to be approached differently.

“Before he started teaching reading and writing he asked his students to reflect on the concepts of justice… He asked his students what he might do to secure justice and suggested that literacy would make them far better able to engage in the struggle they would certainly face if they tried to get a better deal.”

Freire’s intentions were to teach literacy with the intention of education a social class to be able to fight for their rights in an unbalanced Brazil. His teaching eventually led him to be exiled from Brazil, as those formerly illiterate students began to get registered to vote. Freire “understood that for the poor in the slums of Recife literacy as part of the identity of the “other”—a hated other in a society where the gap between the rich and the poor is ever so much more obvious than it is in the United States” Paulo Freire made me think about the Martha Demienteff quote in the Lisa Delpit reading.

We listen to the way people talk not to judge them, but to tell what part of the river they come from. These other people are not like that. They think everybody needs to talk like them. Unlike us they have hard time hearing what people say if they don’t talk exactly like them. Their way of talking and writing is called formal English.

In a way, Demienteff is teaching a Freirean idea, with that quote she is underlying a dislike for those who speak formal English, but she is also hinting that in order to succeed they need to be able to become literate in that world. You can almost feel her expressing and understanding the disdain for the Alaskan native people of the culture of power, but she is teaching them so that one day they can affect change in their communities.

 The literacy that Freire is talking about is also teaching historical and cultural context which is important in any classroom for economically oppressed students.

My favorite passage and the most emotional passage for me in this week’s reading comes from the author describing one of Freire’s thoughts on the poor, “They are so submerged in their daily lives that they have little or no awareness of the possibility for change, much less what they might do to bring about change. They view their conditions as natural, the will of God, or determined by fate” this passage speaks to me on so many levels, and I feel it speaks greatly of our socio-economic system in the US. Our working poor in this country work so hard and are economically running in circles and if they were to stop and think they would notice that it isn’t something natural, or the will of god it is a cause of a system in place by those who want to keep power in their hands. It made me think about my father a lot and the story that I tell to students in the inner city when talking about the word opportunity.

Rhode Island college is nicknamed the college of opportunity and I ask the students to give me a synonym for the word opportunity. usually a student  responds with the word “chance” It is then that I ask the students the question 

Why college? 

Students usually respond with various answers, “to have a better future” or “to make money” or “to have a job that I like”

I then ask them, If I were to ask you parents 

Why do they want you, their children, to go to college what would they say?

I let them respond until I get one of the students to answer “so that I could have a better life than they had.”

I then proceed to tell them about my father and the story goes like this.

"My father was the smartest man I had ever met. When I lived in Dominican Republic he used to read my history text books from front to back within the day and then recited most of the important parts in history to me and help me with my homework. My father had a high school diploma but never had the opportunity to go to college.

After we immigrated to the US, my father took a job at a local supermarket. I never knew what he did for work just that he worked at C-town supermarket. One day my father’s car broke down and I had to pick him up at work. It was winter and the temperature was in single digits.  I arrived to pick him up that day 20 minutes early and when I looked around the parking lot I realized what my father did for a living. My father was the person at the supermarket who retrieved the carriages and I remember looking at him and seeing how the bitter weather conditions had made his skin dry and ashy. Not that there is anything wrong with pushing carriages as it is honest work, but I am talking about the smartest person that I had ever met.  I remember looking at him and understanding something that I was too young to be able to verbalize.

I then proceed to ask the students why do you think the smartest person that I had ever met was pushing carriages for a living?. There is always the one student who says something to the extent of “because he didn’t get an education” My goal is to get those students to think of their own experiences and to think about their working class parents. From experience from working in the community I can tell you that most working class families I come in contact with know that education is the way out of their struggle as working class families, but now we just need to make that education a much more transformational one. 

The Problem that We All Live With

This American Life’s episode 562 discusses the topic of failing schools in largely Black and Hispanic communities. The journalist in this interview, Nikole Hanna Jones has been trying to find solutions to the lack of improvement in schools with large under-represented, minority populations. She states 

“And I would go to schools. And they would just always be trying these new things that actually sounded like they might work. They would do things like “well put a great magnet program here. Or we are going to focus on literacy…. They are always talking, really, about the same things. I mean you could take the conversations and go from district to district to district, and you will always hear the same things”

 The producer of the show Ira Glass then comments “what she noticed was that it never worked. I mean, like never” They begin to set for discussing why schools in underrepresented neighborhoods seem to always fail, and that the achievement gap between white students and black students was so disproportionate. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the achievement gap occurs when one group of students (such as, students grouped by race/ethnicity, gender) outperforms another group and the difference in average scores for the two groups is statistically significant (that is, larger than the margin of error).  As of 2011 the NAEP which is a government funded testing organization that tests students in the nation to measure academic achievement in schools determined that in many ways the achievement gap was still existent. In their report "School Composition and the Black-White Achievement gap they determine white 8^th graders tested on average 31 points higher than Black 8^th graders in the US.This analysis gave reasons as to why it could be that Black students are testing lower than their white counterparts. All of the issues in this government funded study has reiterated the issues that Nikole Hanna Jones argued in her reporting. The theories on why the achievement gap exists can be found in the image below.

Segregation in schools

YES Schools are still segregated

In the report by Nikole Hanna-Jones the term “segregation of schools” is used very deliberately. It is mainstream knowledge that Brown vs Board of education made it unlawful for schools to be segregated. Schools by law can no longer be segregated. However what this report introduces is the new type of segregation that occurs in not so blatant ways as the days before Brown VS Board of education. Policies in American government, gentrification and “The Great White Flight” have all contributed to the re-segregation of schools in America. In a report done by PBS titled the return of school segregation in eight charts, the article gives some shocking statistics on the re-segregation of schools. It goes on to state that Since 1988 the rate of Black students at predominantly white schools in the south  was 43.7%   has gone down to  23.1% in 2012.

 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-return-of-school-segregation-in-eight-charts/

Why is integration Important?

Studies have shown that when schools are diverse and integrated students of color tend to do better in their classes. Students in predominantly white schools have access to better resources, more funding and more effective teachers. Compared to schools who have a high concentration of Black and Latino students, those schools typically have lower graduation rates, less funding, and employ less experienced teachers.  According to the report in the Saint Louis area, nearly 1 in 2 Black children attend schools in districts that performed so poorly, the state has stripped them of full accreditation. Only 1 in 25 white children are in a district like that. That statistic really emphasized everything mentioned in the report.

This report really saddened me and made me really think about the injustices in education in this country. The fact that schools are still funded by property tax, the graduation rates in neighboring districts. In my current job I get to see these gaps immensely. I will go to a high school that has brand new buildings, a 99 percent four year college acceptance rate. I will then travel to a neighboring district where the 4 year college acceptance rate is only 33 percent, the building look decrepit and the students don’t enjoy the luxury of even having up to date technology. I once visited a high school in New York in which the school stopped funding AP classes and couldn’t afford to hire any teachers to teach Geometry or Algebra II so the students had to take it a community college. Those two courses are required for admission at almost every 4 year college or university. I think a lot about the disadvantages of these students. It makes me think of opportunity and how precious it can be for those students, and how those students have little room for failure in a society that is not educating our children equally and fairly. It is even sadder to think that the basic right of a good education, is not a right that is given to everyone.

color blindness

Deconstructing Privilege.

Colorblindness is the new racism.

This week’s article speaks a great deal on the term colorblindness that is being used a lot in mainstream media. The term colorblindness refers to someone that does not see race. The authors describe colorblindness as problematic as well as scientifically unlikely. In order to understand colorblindness, one must first understand that white privilege gives those who are not of a color the option to feel that colorblindness is a thing as opposed to those who are of color who live in color-seeing word daily. In reference to a study done by Fiske and Neuberg that determines that humans quickly place people into categories or schema (category based processes) and that category based classification serves as the default mode for perception. Category based perception can occur automatically and outside of conscious awareness, the study supports a conclusion that the brain makes colorblindness unlikely. The study proves that whether we want to or not or brain uses physical attributes to categorize and relate people to what our perception of race is.  I have attached the video below of a race study that CNN did a couple of years ago that demonstrates the racial bias in children. The study demonstrates that even small children have already begun to put students in categories based on their race, and a good percentage have already begun to have negative connotation towards a darker skin color.

How can colorblindness be hurtful to society?

Colorblindness can be hurtful to society because it invalidates the existence of issues of people of color. Colorblindness is good intent masking “I don’t have to care”. If you are of an oppressed racial makeup you have can’t choose to be colorblind and there are racialized systems in place that work against you and your race. In the classroom to avoid the discussion and to avoid that component of the racial makeup of your student’s is to deny those students their struggles and the challenges that they face in comparison to their white counterparts. I have included a hyperlink that describes race statistics in America to better highlight some of the issues that colorblindness can deny:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30214825

This is not to say that there should be pity involved, or that one should guide discussions based solely on their hardships, but it is to raise a general awareness and to be conscious of a student’s race and the plight that comes with it. To be “colorblind is to ignore the racial biases that are inherent in American society.

The authors of this week’s reading believe that we must us a strategy called color insight in order to properly discuss race and defeat the myth of colorblindness and a post racial society, we must acknowledge that people have privileges or disadvantages based on their race. Color insight refers to a process of thinking about one's own color to discuss race.  There are four steps in engaging in color insight, 

1.     Considering context for any discussions about race

2.     Examining systems of privilege

3.     Unmasking perspectiveness and white normalness.

4.     Combating stereotyping and looking for the "me" in each individual.

The last step in the color insight process really spoke to me. "Looking for the me in the individual" is looking for a commonality between you and someone of another race. I found that looking for the me is a natural process. You tend to care more about an issue when it has to deal with people that look like you. This advocates that one must accept people's differences and to stop assuming that your normal is their normal and that just because their normal is not your normal it does not mean that that their normal is invalid. (WHOA what a run-on sentence, my undergraduate English professors will be disappointed!) thus color insight reminds us to acknowledge our differences and fight for a more equal society.

This week’s reading for some reason, made me think about a young man named Kalief Browder. Kalief Browder was a 16-year-old black male who was accused of stealing a backpack. He was sent to prison without being charged and stayed in prison for 3 years with no charges   and no court date.

No charges and no court date!

While in prison he spent a great deal of time in solitary confinement and he tried to take his own life several times. There was video coverage of him getting assaulted by other prison inmates and correctional officers. He was threatened daily by the correctional officers who were there to guard his man-made cage. When he was finally released Kalief began to have hallucinations he once threw his television out of his window claiming that the television was watching him and lived in constant paranoia that he would be thrown back in jail.  After his release he was quoted saying:

People tell me because I have this case against the city I'm all right," he told the magazine. "But I'm not all right. I'm messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that's not going to help me mentally. I'm mentally scarred right now. That's how I feel. Because there are certain things that changed about me and they might not go back."

The New York times published an article on him and an anonymous donor offered to pay all of his college expenses. He began taking classes at a community college in the Bronx. He even was able to meet Jay-Z and Rosie O’Donnell. The paranoia started again and one day his mother had found that he had committed suicide in his room, a victim of injustice and the prison system.  He was only 22 years old.

In my life I have never had a news story affect me as much as this one. I try not to make everyday things about race but how could I not? I often wonder would this have happened if Kalief was Kyle? Arrested maybe, but three years with no court date, no trial and no charges. Highly unlikely. To be colorblind is to not to be able to have an honest conversation on what people of color determine are the issues that are plaguing their communities. To pretend that this could have happened to anyone, is to pretend that the judicial system is color-blind. To pretend that the judicial system is colorblind is to pretend that African American males don’t account for 60 percent of the us prison population. To pretend that our society is colorblind is to be blind.