5. In chapter 10, Kozol writes about how the American legal system can be used to fight against apartheid. He mentions that there have been many attempts to desegregate schools and bring equality that at times have been unsuccessful. The court system has a hard time with actually being effective when it comes to the issue of apartheid. Also, in chapter 12, Kozol writes about different schools, that he has visited in America, that suffer from segregation. Overall, these two chapters described how the government works with these issues and how Kozol has been interactive in the problem of segregation.
4. Pg. 245 – “Thirty-five out of 48 states spend less on students in school districts with the highest numbers of minority children than on students in the districts with the fewest children of minorities.”
Pg. 246 – “In several states, moreover, the funding gap for children of color is a great deal larger than the gap for children of low income.”
Pg. 249 – “Efforts to return the focus of this struggle from the local courts and legislative bodies to the federal level, not through further litigation but through legislative processes, have been attempted in the past few years by several members of Congress. The leadership has come, in large part, from black members of the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Pg. 300 – “The schools where children and their teachers still are given opportunities to poke at worms, and poke around into the satisfactions of uncertainty, need to be defended from the unenlightened interventions of the overconfident. These are the schools I call ‘the treasured places.’ They remind us always of the possible.”
3. Racial Isolation (pg. 239) – students of different races separated or not given as much attention
Inequity (pg. 263) – unfairness in schools especially regarding different races
“Super-teachers” (pg. 293) – subject to idolatry in movies and books from time to time; too many in the real world
2. Interning at a school where Whites were the minority was a great experience for me. There was never a problem of segregation in the school, but racial isolation was apparent whether it was on purpose or not. Most Hispanic students who attended the school were on the same academic level, so, most of the time they were grouped together and grouped away from the Whites.
1. What more can we as teachers do to make the government realize how big of a problem apartheid still is and that it needs to be fixed?
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I love this question Pri!
ReplyDeleteThe simple answer is that they are not held accountable by the people who elect them (US). When we embrace the responsibility to hold our elected officials accountable it is then that they will be accountable. When we as teachers become not only active inside of our classrooms but also in our communities we will be heard by the policy-makers and quite frankly feared by those who depend upon us for the votes that keep them in office.
It does seem odd that in the richest nation with the most well educated population that we would actually still allow an achievement, opportunity, economic gap to exist in our schools and communities. Essentially it comes down to priorities. We should ask ourselves each day "what have I done today to close the gap between the haves and have nots."
I live by the mantra - "think globally - act locally." If each of us were to embrace this philosophy the "local would become the global."