Blog Post #8

 Literacy with an Attitude by Patrick J. Finn

Reflection:

As disheartening as it is to say, I can't say I found any of the findings Finn discusses shocking. While I did not have Anyon's descriptors to talk about it, I feel like there has always been an understanding that schools differ based on background. For example, when I was in high school (which I would describe as a middle-class school aspiring to be an affluent professional), I was on the Science Olympiad team, which was an after-school club for us. Every year at the state competition, we viewed Barrington (an affluent professional school) as our rivals and cursed the fact that they had a class, not just a club, to work on constructing knowledge for the competition. At the time, I certainly knew that there was a distinct difference in available resources and the background of the students, but I never thought about how those differences fit into the larger world. Warwick is mostly working or middle-class families, so of course our schools reflect that. Barrington has a much more affluent reputation, which is reflected in its schools. 

These are the results from the last Science Olympiad I participated in. The distribution of scores among Rhode Island high schools generally follows Anyon's observations.

Even before I got to high school, Anyon's observations about the differences in each "class" of school hold true to my experiences. From middle school, if not late elementary school, we began to be tracked into classes, and those of us in Honors classes were especially pressured to start thinking about college and careers (I couldn't find the original survey I did, but the College Board one seems similar). Assignments were often those like fill-in-the-blanks that were easily completed, but required little construction of knowledge. I did have some projects that were more sophisticated, but they were exceptions, not the rule. While I found "busy work" easy, I never really felt satisfied after doing it, and they are tools I don't want to use much in my classroom.

The differences in pedagogy across incomes are something that has been increasingly brought to my attention once I decided to become an educator. A frankly alarming number of people, from teachers in my high school to college professors to my own relatives, have encouraged me to avoid lower-income schools and instead try to teach at upper-class schools so I could have more pedagogical freedom. I have even been told to avoid secondary education altogether and only teach at the post-secondary level to avoid frustration with curriculum control. These arguments have both confused and infuriated me. If we have a broken system, shouldn't the solution be to fix it, not abandon it and leave it to rot? If all motivated teachers leave the schools where they are needed, the status quo will persist, and disparities will worsen. I know that my soapboxing runs the risk of making me one of the White liberal teachers Delpit discusses, but I think educators need to make change where it is needed, not where it has already started.

Question to Share: 

Based on Finn's discussion of using Anyon's findings in his own classes and my own personal experiences, these divisions seem to be near universal, at least in American schools. So, has anyone been to a school that defies these classifications?