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JIGSAW:Readings and Findings #7: Social Justice (Readings and Findings #7:…

- - - - White Disadvantage: The Effects of Racial Isolation on White Pre-Service Teachers
        
        “Fifty years after school desegregation, white middle class students are still being raised in racially segregated schools (Orfield, & Lee 2007), attending segregated social and religious institutions and having little or no experience with members of other racial groups.” (Abdullah, S. A., Llanes, J. R. & Henry, D. p.34).
        
        “Pre-service teachers most naturally bring their life experiences and prior classroom experiences as students into their initial teaching practice.” (Abdullah, S. A., Llanes, J. R. & Henry, D. p.34).
      - Literature Review
        
        Sirin, Brabeck, Satiani and Rogers Serin (2003) also point out that negative perspectives of certain cultures can prevent teachers from respecting their students. Abdullah et al. 2015, p. 35)
        
        Early national studies of Federal Programs observed cross-cultural classroom behavior and noted that white children were given more access by white teachers while children of color were kept away (Stallings, 1980),
        
        Ladson-Billings (1992) encourages white pre-service teachers to develop self concepts and understandings of their students that are based on historical facts and current events and avoid thinking of their students of color as victims of slavery and other forms of discrimination.
      - Methodology
        
        “The course described in this study was both classroom-based and field-based. Students were placed in schools and school-like environments where students performed a service learning activity.” (Abdullah, S. A., Llanes, J. R. & Henry, D. p.36).
        
        Analyzed 218 student essays from Foundation of Education school
        
        The sample that was observed consisted of all students who identified as and presented themselves as White, consisting of 218 students. The Spring cohort also contained 17 non-white students who are not part of the sample.
        
        A great majority of the students (83 per cent) in the course were women. The diversity in the class consisted of some regional diversity, but most of the students were from the Southeast United States, specifically, Alabama and Georgia, coming from mostly homogeneous primarily white middle to upper class communities according to their essays.
      - Results
        
        Values and morals are connected with race and economic status.
        
        One student discussed how grateful they were for their upbringing because it seems to have helped them avoid the phenomenon of white disadvantage. “From kindergarten through eighth grade I attended a Catholic school, where the majority of students were white. I am so grateful that my parents decided to send me to a public high school because it opened my eyes to so many different views and cultures.” (Abdullah et al. 2015, p. 39)
      - Recommendations
        
        If pre-service teachers have white disadvantage, it can be argued they shouldn't be able to teach.
        
        Pre-service teachers should also be exposed to multiple diverse populations in their practice and service learning experiences. Educations programs should facilitate more developmentally appropriate service learning, and require professionally relevant service learning with observation components before students can earn their license. (Abdullah et al. 2015, p. 40)
    - - Data and Methods
        
        “Recent research has found that teachers’ classroom-aggregate ratings on the Tripod predict students learning gains not only for the students who provided the rating but also for students in other classrooms of students taught by the same teacher” (Cherng, H. S., & Halpin, P. F. p.3).
        
        “The MET study only tracked teachers over year, not students. While many students contributed data in both years of the study, it is not possible to link student data over years, and hence it is not possible to use both years for multilevel modeling.” (Cherng,2016, pg 3)
      - Implications
        
        “ In the end, minority teachers, who likely possess tools to form strong ties with students, can help empower youth of all racial/ethnic identities.” (Cherng, H. S., & Halpin, P. F. p.11).
      - Discussion Summary
        
        “We also find mixed evidence that perceptions of minority students depend on the race/ethnicity of their teacher: Black students have particularly favorable perceptions of Black teachers, but the same is not true for Latino students and Latino teachers” (Cherng, H. S., & Halpin, P. F. p.6).
      - A Demographic Divide: The Importance of Racial/ Ethnic Mismatch in Teacher and Student Populations
        
        “Scholars have argued that positive student-teacher race matching effects may be explained in part by students having more favorable perceptions of minority teachers” (Cherng, H. S., & Halpin, P. F. p.2).
        
        “Although previous research has addressed teachers’ perceptions of students and explored questions of race matching, relatively little work has explicitly addressed whether students, and especially minority students, have more favorable perceptions of minority versus non-minority teachers.” (Cherng,2016, pg 2)
        
        “Teachers have higher expectations of White and Asian American students and lower expectations of Latino and Black students” (Cherng, H. S., & Halpin, P. F. p.2).
      - Analytical Strategy
        
        “This approach also allowed for examination of whether students have more favorable perceptions of co-racial/ethnic teachers by the inclusion of interactions terms between student and teacher race/ethnicity” (Cherng,2016, pg 5)
      - Results
        
        “ female students also have more favorable perceptions of teachers across six of the seven outcome measures (the exception is control, for which girls are similar in their perceptions to boys)” (Cherng, H. S., & Halpin, P. F. p.5).
        
        All Students respond better to minority teachers
        
        “In general, minority students have more positive perceptions of their teachers than White students” (Cherng,2016, pg 5)
- - - - • “To the extent that an anti-oppression approach emphasizes a critical sociocultural theory of learning, then, it may be at odds with a cognitive developmental approach to teaching for social justice” (Kelly & Brooks, 2009, pp. 204).
    - - Aside from the capacity for independent opinion formation, can children understand abstract concepts?
    - - “When teachers are sensitive to countering oppression, many such “teachable moments” as Kelly described will arise in and around the classroom.
      - , when the participants talked about childhood innocence, they seemed to be invoking the notion of children as blank slates
      - “’I would rather that I deprive them of a little bit of their innocence in an educated and prudent way,’ explained Amanda, ‘rather than have it be drastically ripped off of them by some other person who does something to them, or you know tells them something in a way that they can’t handle because it’s too much all at once.’”
  - - - “The second element is a commitment to principled action to achieve social justice."
        
        “Underpinning this is a view of democratic citizenship as deliberative and action-oriented.”
        
        “Anti- oppression educators work to create classrooms where their students can think about where they stand on social issues and what they might do to ameliorate suffering and inequities among groups of people with whom they are familiar as well as those with whom they have had little or no contact."
      - “The first element involves teachers in a critical analysis of social and institutional inequities and oppression based on gender, race, culture, sexuality, social class, ability, age, and so on.”
        
        “They recognize that teaching is inevitably political because it involves decisions that affect both the distribution of power, status, resources, and opportunities as well as whose knowledge is recognized and validated.
        
        “Anti-oppressive educators must assess who benefits and who loses in prevailing economic, political, and social arrangements. They must take into account the power of dominant institutions to perpetuate the status quo and shape what gets taken up as “common sense” and attempt to counter or interrupt oppressive power relations.”
      - “Teaching for social justice necessarily entails classroom discussions of inequities and injustice. A commonly expressed concern is that such a focus will simply make children feel badly or lead to harmful and divisive talk.”
      - “The third element is the understanding that teaching and learning are social practices mediated by language and shifting social and historical contexts.”
        
        “Allied to this is a view of people’s identities as culturally produced within relations of power. The identities of children and youth, for example, have been historically constructed in dominant culture as opposite to that of adults (irrational, emotional, ignorant, carefree, etc.), and this construction has then been used to legit- imate curtailing their self-determination (e.g., power over what and how they learn in school).”
        
        “To say that children’s identities are culturally produced also emphasizes that they are active in this process, not just passively taught ideas and values by adults, as they are conceived in socialization theory."
    - - “In general, when the participants talked about childhood innocence, they seemed to be invoking the notion of children as blank slates, occasionally expressing fear of disrupting children’s “natural” innocence.”
      - “Many teachers said that protecting childhood innocence would not influence their choice of topic but, rather, their approach to it. They emphasized tailoring their approach based on their knowledge of, and time with, the children.”
      - “The greater the belief in childhood innocence, the more likely teachers were to intimate or state that they would avoid “iffy,” “scary,” or “heavy” topics unless their early primary students raised them first.”
- - - - Through weak social ties, discussion of Ms. Baker’s alleged transgressions traveled and ultimately coalesced into an actionable concern.18 Parental disquiet was formalized by the creation of a petition that was circulated among Cherry Elementary parents
      - Several parents repeated the rumors of Ms. Baker’s past absences to me, and a few even said that she had been chronically absent in the present academic year
      - he petition featured two demands:
        (1) the investigation of Ms. Baker and
        (2) assurance that the children of the parents who signed the petition would not be assigned to Ms. Baker’s classroom, regardless of the results of the investigation
    - - based analysis of race-related issues that I subscribe to would discuss the relevance of race, not just to black families but aiso to white families, as they operate in the same spaces and attempt similar tasks, like educational customization
      - They argue that “students and parents enter the educational system with dispositional skills and knowledge that differentially facilitate or impede their ability to conform to institutionalized expectations.”
      - “Their parents just don’t care.”
        
        The belief that engaged parents can help salve educational woes is, in part, supported by research findings that parental involvement and participation are associated with positive educational outcomes
      - Undesirable
        
        Family Btckground
        
        Institutional Reception
        
        Natural Growth Concerted Cultivation
        
        Cultural Capital
        
        DcsiraWc
        
        Socioeconomic Status Race Gender Family Type
        
        Formal and Informal Rules Local History
    - - Often parents engage with the school in order to monitor a child’s academic progress and maintain a supple relationship with the school; they can also use their presence in and familiarity with the school as a basis for leveraging more educational resources for their children
      - Nearly all parents are interested in their children getting a quality education, but not all parents are able to influence their children’s educational pathway
      - This desire to increase the chances of their child’s success cut across social class and race.
    - - Schools are complex organizations with unique cultures that help shape and structure parental engagement. It is not enough to have a parent who is interested in being engaged; schools and their staff shape and broker what is appropriate or desirable parental engagement.
      - formal rules can include school-wide policies such as how to request a teacher or classroom-level policies such as when baked goods can be brought to school. At the school level, formal rules are created by building administrators or dictated by the central administration
      - information is a crucial resource that can be a gateway to other education- related opportunities. The structure of networks and the information that was transmitted to families allowed them to gain access to official school- related events as well as to information that was not official but was meaningful
      - lower income parents do not always have time to do all of the extra curriculars that higher income families can do.
    - - Rolling Acres schools in the primary grades did not offer gifted or accelerated courses or programs. As a result, parents who wanted to customize their children’s education often lobbied to get their child into a preferred teacher’s class
        
        During my time in the field there was a consistent narrative among black and white administrators and teachers that low-income families, who were predominantly black, did not participate in school matters, despite outreach
      - The location that black families occupied in RAPS was further affected by the relationship between black and white families and competition. In this section I present a case from Cherry Elementary School about parental organizing and interracial competition for the resources of quality teachers.
        
        Teacher selection was a popular practice among parents but not among building staff. Each school building was responsible for determining its own protocol around teacher selection. In both of the schools I observed, principals did not prefer the process of teacher selection, but they still had to struggle to manage the individual and collective efforts of parents to do so.
- - - - increasing the achievement gap
    - - "Because of the self-selection process involved in deciding to take AP courses, this intervention was primarily utilized by the highest per- forming groups of achievers” (155).
        
        AP and CCP offered at lower and higher SES schools
    - - What Does It Mean to “Go for Broke” for all Children in Urban Schools?
        
        ““Going for broke” means doing whatever it takes to shine the brightest lights on educational inequities experienced by poor children, African American and other children of color, children identified with disabilities, and children affected by the intersection of all of these issues.” (Blanchett, 2009, p. 385)
        
        "high-stakes testing, inadequately prepared teachers, culturally unresponsive curriculum, and No Child Left Behind"
      - The Reality of Special Education in Practice for African American Students
        
        “…few urban educators have acknowledged the experiences of students of color labeled as having disabilities as they have addressed some of the most significant issues and challenges facing students in urban settings, a disproportionate percentage of whom are poor, African American, and Hispanic” (371).
      - The Original Intent of Special Education in Theory and Practice
        
        “Moreover, research suggests that the benefits of inclusion are significant for all students. Students with disabilities who are included in general education classrooms have higher levels of social skills, are more accepted by their nondisabled peers, and have greater exposure to the general education curriculum” (Blanchett, 2009, pp. 376).
      - Who Are the Real Beneficiaries of Failed Urban Schools and Resegregation?
        
        University/school partnerships with urban schools are seen as a business that "pimps" out the urban school.
        
        “A lot of the blame for the current state of urban education has been placed on failed urban school districts, and although I believe that some of it is justified, I caution us to remember that urban school districts and systems do not operate in a vacuum and are in fact often a microcosm of the larger American society.” (Blanchett, 2009, p. 382)
      - A Historical Analysis of Brown’s Relationship to and Effect on Special Education
        
        “In addition to prohibiting racial segregation in public education, the Brown decision was especially important in securing appropriate educational services and opportunities for students with disabilities.” (Blanchett, 2009, p. 372)
        
        When students with disabilities were served, they were often educated in “ghetto like” isolated and “run-down” classrooms within buildings that housed students without disabilities or in separate facilities altogether. Such terms as ghetto-like and run-down have often been used to describe the physical environments of some of the segregated schools," (Blanchett, 373)
      - Brown v. Board challenged the constitutionality of "separate but equal"
      - From Bown to the Legal Resegregation of African American Students Through Special Education Placement
        
        IDEA is the most important education legislation for students with disabilities
        
        “They called attention to the fact that African American children were labeled as mildly mentally retarded and their White peers not labeled at all, even when White children evidenced more visibly obvious disabilities than the African American students.” (Blanchett, 2009, p. 380)
        
        African American Students are more likely to be segregated and not be placed in general education
      - Resegregation
        
        Was legal through special education placement
        
        More African American students were labeled as needing special education in order to keep them segregated
- - - - justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society.
      - Despite all the talk about social justice of late, it is often unclear in any practical terms what we mean when we invoke a vision of social justice or how this influences such issues as program development, curriculum, practicum opportunities, educational philosophy, social vision, and activist work. Hytten, K., & Bettez, S. C Pg. 8
      - . Rizvi (1998) argues that “the immediate difficulty one confronts when examining the idea of social justice is the fact that it does not have a single essential meaning"
    - - Social Justice Oriented Teachers. The participants who espoused an anti-oppression approach, by contrast, saw that their pedagogical decisions (and non-decisions) either supported or challenged the inequitable status quo. They did not want to feign neutrality; instead, they desired to model inquiry and engagement while ensuring that their viewpoints were open to student critique.
      - Non political teachers-The issue of children’s ability to form their own opinion—captured in everyday metaphors of children as “sponges,” “blank slates,” and “parrots” versus the less common image of children as active meaning-makers—is crucial. These assumptions about children helped to shape how the participants interpreted their role as teachers. The more they expressed concerns about “tainting” students with their opinions, the more likely they were to espouse a position of teacher neutrality (an impossible and undesirable fiction, for reasons we outlined earlier) and to steer away from social justice teaching.
    - - because teachers have a wide arrange of different opinions of when it should be taught it makes it hard to set up a unified system in school for teaching it
        
        because of the fact that there is no unified system means that students often get information about it in just a few class are in disproportion amounts.
    - - Children have a certain way about them that make them different from anything else in society. They are so open and different in the world it's amazing.
      - Many teachers said that protecting childhood innocence would not influence their choice of topic but, rather, their approach to it. They emphasized tailoring their approach based on their knowledge of, and time with, the children. Kelly, D. M., & Brooks, M. Pg. 208
      - The issue of children’s ability to form their own opinion—captured in everyday metaphors of children as “sponges,” “blank slates,” and “parrots” versus the less common image of children as active meaning-makers—is crucial. These assumptions about children helped to shape how the participants interpreted their role as teachers. Kelly, D. M., & Brooks, M. Pg. 209