How does critical pedagogy reveal and confront the role that schooling plays throughout history in the United States?
Legal ⭐
School Choice ⭐
Standards Movement ⭐
IASA - 1994 - reforms for Title I; increased funding for bilingual and immigrant education; and provisions for public charter schools, drop-out prevention, and educational technology.
NCLB - 2001; Designed to raise teacher quality, give parents greater options and choices for their child’s education, and established standards, assessments and accountability.
Reagan era Learning Crisis
IASA - 1994; Called for strategies to hold school districts and schools accountable for improved student achievement.
Sputnik 1957 - leads to American fear of loss of global education status and a race to the moon
Choice Movement
2002 - Zelman v. Simmons-Harris - School vouchers can be used to attend private schools including secular schools.
NCLB - 2001; The law reauthorizes the ESEA of 1965 and replaces the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, mandates high-stakes student testing, holds schools accountable for student achievement levels, and provides penalties for schools that do not make adequate yearly progress toward meeting the goals of NCLB.
NDEA -1958 - increased science and math education funding
Brown v. Board of Education - 1955 Overturns previous SCOTUS ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson. Separate is NOT equal.
1963 - Lyndon Johnson, a former school teacher becomes president
2002 - Zelman v. Simmons-Harris; SCOTUS ruled that certain school voucher programs are constitutional and do not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Title IV - equal access in school and activities for girls
ESSA - 2015; Replaced expired NCLB Act. Gives education policy decisions back to the states. Does not address inequities in education.
NCLB - Bottom line and business model thinking
Vouchers are $2500-4700 - not enough to attend very affluent schools and do not go far enough to level the playing field as intended.
Vouchers and the spirit of competition do nothing to address inequities and feed the assumption of a level playing field for minority and low-income students.
Vouchers are more of a magnifying glass that expose unaddressed inequities than a magic wand with any power to fix what it can't see is broken.
Vouchers and choice are proposed to increase school competition and end the "monopoly " that public schools hold.
Choice = Small alternative schools in existing building
Different focus, science, art, dance, - all had the same goal, increase student achievement.
Homeschooling
Christian right in late 1990's worked to legalize homeschooling in all 50 states.
E.A.I - private company "invested" in public education because they thought they could do it better than the government. Refurbished buildings and cut red tape. Fired union employees and ultimately failed.
Black schools lacked amenities that White schools had - science lab, gymnasium, foreign language teachers. They had old textbooks that were discarded from the White schools.
Integrated schools often had segregated extra curricular activities like sports and dances. Many classes were also segregated - different English classes for Whites and Latinx students.
Marketplace model - run schools like a business - test scores = profit
Choice was created to reform public schools. But it ignores inherent inequities in the system and does nothing to address oppression while at the same time causing more problems by closing failing neighborhood schools and displacing minority and low-income students.
Establishing standards and a focus on math and science education coupled with the removal of liberal arts does not empower students. It is designed to create docile workers who act as cogs in a machine that will feed the American economy as low wage workers.
"Who is in charge of selecting what is appropriate knowledge and what is not appropriate?"
Social class vs. Knowledge in schools
