Democracy/Education

1. KOZOL CHAPTERS 11/12
B. STARK
APRIL 8, 2015
B. Stark
4/8/15

2. Chapter 11: Deadly Lies
 No Child Left Behind
 Kozol sees a sustained attack on “many teachers
who do not ascribe to the beliefs and practices
that are embodied in” NCLB (265)
 Pres. Bush “accused those who disagree with him …of
being the unconscious bearers of ‘soft bigotry’”
 Paige (former education secretary) accused National
Education Association (teachers union) of being “’a
terrorist organization’” for criticism (265) [See also
Margaret Spellings]

3. Deadly Lies
 Standards-based reforms
 “No strong evidence linking additional resources
to improved performances” (267)
 See: Standards and Assessment Group and
Accountability Group
 According to Kozol, what are the results of
standards-based reforms?

4. Deadly Lies
 Other failed educational reforms include
“open schools” or “free schools” (See 270-1)
 What are the results of having a “distinctive
pedagogy” for children? (272)

5. Deadly Lies
 OTHER issues:
 “Niche academies” attract children of white families vs.
career-based niche academies that are “clearly targeted at
poor children of color” (276)
 Preferential treatment of children at these academies (“The
teachers and students of the large school sometimes ooze
resentment at the small school starting up within their
walls” (277)
 1990s: Monroe High School in the South Bronx had a business
and LawAcademy; high turnover of administrators; colossal
dropout rate; 97% black and Hispanic (277); See also 278 and 279

6. Deadly Lies
 Achievement gap between black and white
children narrowed until the 1980s; opened in the
1990s (280)
 Strict accountability (no flexibility)
 Media skews information (281)
 Schools make radical adjustments to calendars,
classes, cut back on music, art, recess, phy ed) in
order to comply to state demands for testing

7. Deadly Lies
 Dropout rates at hyper-segregated secondary
schools remains high
 48% of high schools in nation’s 100 largest districts
(highest concentrations of black and Hispanic
students) less than 50% of the entering 9th graders
graduate in 4 years (282)
 75% don’t on the national level (1993 – 2002) (282)
 Graduation rates have frozen or dropped for black and
Hispanic students
 This affects the university level as well: 2004
Washington Post: 350 African-American freshmen
enrolled at University of Michigan out of entering class
of 6,000 students; lowest number in 15 years, decline
of 500 from nearly 3 years earlier (282)

8. Deadly Lies
 Changes in affirmative action policies
 Increased in tuition costs (Florida;
Demos.org)
 Low SAT scores forAfrican Americans
 Widening gulf in math and reading levels
between races (283)

9. Chapter 12: Treasured Places
 “The Issues are big; children are small” (285)
 “In these settings, teachers do not tend to let
concerns about our nation’s competition in
the global marketplace intrude upon the
more important needs of childhood, such as
the right to find some happiness in being
children” (286)

10. Treasured Places
 Teachers who see creativity at schools will want
to BE at those schools (286)
 Standardized tests may still be required “but
nobody tells the children that their test results
define their worthiness or that these numbers
measure their identities, or that the limited
forms of learning that are tested by a
standardized exam are more important than the
ones to which governmental numbers cannot be
attached” (287).

11. Treasured Places
 Descriptions of teachers who engage in eccentric and fun
(creative) behaviors --“eccentric” (295)
 See: Mr. Bedrock (mature teacher) Story: 292-295
 Human, caring, community-oriented (“Virtually all the truly
human elements of teacher motivations have been locked
out of the market misperceptions that control so much of
education policy today; but when we go back to the schools
in which these market ideologies have been most valiantly
resisted, we are reminded of a set of satisfactions and
devotions that are very different from the ones that
dominate the present discourse about urban education”
(297).

12. Treasured Places
 “Teachers and principals should not permit the beautiful
profession they have chosen to be redefined by those who
know far less than they about the hearts of children” (299).
 “The schools where children and their teachers are still
given opportunities to poke at works, and poke around into
the satisfactions of uncertainty, need to be defended7 from
the unenlightened interventions of the overconfident.
These are the schools I call ‘the treasured places.’They
remind us always of the possible” (300).
 See: Teachers see creativity as cure for math trauma
(Tampa BayTimes, March 29, 2015):
http://www.tampabay.com/incoming/educators-embrace-
new-methods-to-cure-math-trauma/2223147

13. The End