Preview

Education Reflection

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
394 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Education Reflection
“Reflection Précis”
Reflection Précis #2, Tracking, Radical Possibilities, Race ethnicity, etc. (10/16)
PART I: The article Tracking focuses on elaborating how teachers and counselors choose to split students into three categories: “fast, average, or slow learners”, depending on test scores (pg.3). Some schools state that they do not track students but that they place them where they would feel more comfortable. Standardized tests were created to sort “students into ability or achievement groups” (pg.11). But the problem with separating students into this so called achievement groups is that some people question the fairness on standardized tests. Some do not believe that the scores are based on meritocratic factors but on race, social class, and economic status making this test bias and unfair. The reality is that “poor and minority students” score lower than do whites (pg.11). Now tracking isn’t the goals for the schools but certain students still are placed do to their scores. In Inequality by design the article informs the public that The Bell Curve actually “measures academic instruction people have had, not their inherent abilities”, or even if they did, they do not inform the inequalities individual faced. The article states that minorities such as: African and Latino Americans tend to be in the lower economical status. The reason for this is because “ethnic groups are socially unequal” (pg.172). The article then goes on to inform us that such factors as freedom have gotten in the way of economical status. Many subordinate groups’ faces segregation and has been about forty years that black, Latinos, and women have earned more rights. The chart on page 174 depicts that minorities tend to have low test scores due to socioeconomic deprivation, group segregation, and stigma of inferiority. Basically students that are minorities do worst on test because they have so much weight behind them. In The Economic is Possibility, it informs the public that the only

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In Pedro Noguera’s “Unequal Outcomes, Unequal Opportunities: Closing the Achievement Gap in Berkeley” and the video “Off Track: Classroom Privilege for All”, both the video and the article talks about the negativities of the tracking system in the schools. They get into how the tracking system has divided the students in ways that we didn’t realize. Both the article and video shows how the students are put in this tracking system where not all students benefit in. There are some students, mostly minority students are put in lower level courses that is not beneficial to them or helps them reach their full potential. For a long time this tracking system has been here in many schools but yet there has not been any changes made to stop this tracking system from continuing in the schools. There are many factors that lie behind this system that would make it difficult for anyone to stop this problem.…

    • 1551 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    This case exposes the issues of equality in the education system, and more specifically, within standardized testing. Standardized testing is a set metric used to measure the academic ability of all students who take the test. However, as is illuminated in the case of Lara and Roy, this kind of metric only reveals a small piece of information about some students’ academic achievement. Lara’s creativity and Roy’s social skills were invisible to eyes of the standardized tests, and as a result, they were penalized for, not their own, but for the tests’ shortcomings.…

    • 1469 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In an article published by Inequality.org entitled “How America Is Failing It’s Schools” (23 June, 2015), Salvatore Babones argues that “the real crisis in American education is not the schools system,” but rather inequality. He argues this point by providing statistics that prove that highly-concentrated impoverished communities result in lower test scores that, consequently, make America trudge behind international standards; by blaming the public for denouncing the schools that helplessly educate poor children without many resources; and by reaffirming that failing schools are not the result of parents, teachers, or the students themselves, but of inequality. Babones’s purpose is to address and hopefully better America’s equality, eventually…

    • 236 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    By using tests, Terman and Jordan convinced many schools “to place slow students into special classes, rigid academic tracks, or entirely separate schools” (Stoskopf). Here, smart students were in one school and the people who do not meet a certain standard on a standardized test go to a different one. Even though Terman and Jordan did not explain the two school's differences thoroughly, the “smart” school probably has better resources and teachers than the “unintelligent” school. This is outrageous because Terman and Jordan’s actions are the same as what white people did to people of color, which is racism, a belief that should be abolished. They treated them unfairly because the whites thought the other races did not have as many abilities as their own. Even if racism was accepted, it is unfair to some students because the tests might not contain a person’s academic strength. Additionally, PAUSD's mission statement, it states, “we allow ALL students to acquire educational and social competencies…”, but Terman and Jordan did the exact opposite, therefore, two prominent figures in Palo Alto have to be banished, or else the mission statement would be invalid (District, Palo Alto Unified School). Besides separating the students, Terman and Jordan claimed that African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Latino children “cannot master abstractions that can often be made into efficient workers” (Terman 92). In other words, the two eugenicists believe that the three races listed above are too ignorant to work in the real world because they cannot learn challenging concepts. Racism is shown here because the degradation is targeted to specific races. Also, people look at that person’s skill rather than their race, for example, Martin Luther King, an African-American who changed the world completely. This proves that…

    • 1345 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In his article titled: Why Labor Should Support Class-Based Affirmative Action Kahlenburg provides insight as to why this change in affirmative action is necessary. On the topic of why this view is a more progressive option today, Kahlenburg states, “Forty-five years later, Americans are still fighting over affirmative action, and the policy of racial preferences in higher education remains a fundamentally conservative practice. An ideal admissions system would consider merit in the broadest sense: not just grades and test scores and leadership, but all of those things in the context of what obstacles a student has had to overcome in life. Research suggests that today, those obstacles are primarily economic in nature. Anthony Carnevale at Georgetown University finds that a child growing up with socioeconomic disadvantages—in families where parents have little formal education, income, and wealth, in neighborhoods with concentrations of poverty and the like—is expected to score 399 points lower on the math and verbal sections of the SAT than the most socioeconomically advantaged children”…

    • 1268 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    School districts frequently put their focus on schools who display academic prowess, but ignore schools in poor areas because they do not show equal academic scores. Bias educational administration’s logic is that since they’ll do badly anyway, money should not be wasted on children who will find no use in education, ironically it leads into vicious cycle that puts black and Latino boys to a disadvantage. Since these marginalized children are not doing well in school, the district doesn’t send them financial support, but in order for them to improve, they require financial support. Consequently, the discipline is imbalance and based on the idea that these black and Latino children are integrally trouble makers, so they’re treated as problems long before they’re treated like…

    • 1206 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Some educators will argue that the achievement gap is not just an African American issue and other groups are being victimized of the problem too, which is true. Students of all different races are experiencing the achievement gap including white students. However, according to “Racial and Ethnic Achievement Gaps” African Americans are experiencing the gap the most. Students start showing the gap as young as the first grade in reading and math skills. “As of 2012, the white-black and white-Hispanic achievement gaps were 30-40% smaller than they were in the 1970s. Nonetheless, the gaps are still very large, ranging from 0.5 to 0.9 standard deviations.” (Racial and Ethnic Achievement Gaps). Our country is starting to see the gap closing, but we are still experiencing the effects of the negative contributions.…

    • 405 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    When reading Still Separate, Still Unequal, Kozol’s argument indicates that students of the minority basically are limited in what they can achieve from a very young age. He discusses the issue of “money” and how wealthy white individuals are able to educate their toddlers in very extensive programs before they even enter kindergarten at the age of five. By the time the students are expected to take standardized tests in 3rdgrade, these white students have had far more education than minority students who are expected to take the same standard exams. He goes on to say that money IS an important object within education because it makes the difference of whether or not a parent can afford to send their child to a private school that costs $30,000 a year, or an inner city urban school down the street. I believe that examples like these regarding money that Kozol gave in his article are what primarily begins the “segregated education” years in a child’s life. From there, he argues that inner city school districts are limiting minority students’ achievements rather than encouraging them to succeed.…

    • 1591 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The achievement gap is the tested difference of performance between minorities and their counterpart on standardize test such as the SAT and rates of educational attainment. One central factor to the achievement gap is the belief in the black inferiority myth it most clearly affect the correcting of the achievement gap and was a huge part of creating the original gap. “If we are going to have this public conversation about African American student achievement, it will inevitable become a conversation that blames black parents, black students and the black community. The danger is that it will become yet another location for the recycling of the ideology of the African American moral, cultural and intellectual deficiency”(young gifted and black…

    • 623 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled segregation in public schools, unconstitutional. The separate but equal act provided much to be desired for blacks educationally. Today we are experiencing a similar problem. Public schools in communities with a high population of minorities are severely lacking in academic achievement. Public high schools in these communities have been known to have an extremely low graduation rate, while those who do graduate many times academically fall far below those who come from a better district. Predominantly black schools are known to have far less funding than the average majority white school. Education is the first peg on the wheel of racial inequality.…

    • 108 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Achievement Gap Essay

    • 819 Words
    • 4 Pages

    This gap can be seen in different contexts such as grades and test scores, and is seen starting from preschool all the way to college. The dimensions of the achievement gap include opportunities that not all children have access to such as school funding, class sizes, teacher quality, healthcare, food, recreational activities, summer enrichment programs and shelter. Some people in the education field and government think that these factors are uncontrollable. But, when looking at the achievement gap those factors are overlooked, and replaced the idea that children of color are inferior, or it is their culture that allows them to fail (Boykin & Noguera, 2011; Wilson…

    • 819 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In 2010 there were 6 million Latinos, 5 million African-Americans, 5 million Caucasians, and 547,000 Asian-Americans that were in poverty under the age of 18. If ties between the poor and labor force were improved, low-income schooling would be better to improve the quality of workers coming from those areas (Reed) Those that have lower income would have assistance from affirmative action, which would move away from race-based affirmative action policies. States that removed race-based affirmative action, they replaced it with socioeconomic affirmative action, which takes into consideration where an individual lives, and their family’s monetary value. A study conducted at the University of Texas at Austin showed during 1996 when race was used during admission 4.1% of African-American students were accepted, and 14.5% of Latino students were accepted, but during 2004 when they used socioeconomic status and the top 10% plan (anyone who is in the top 10% of their class gets admission) African-american students admission raised to 4.5% and Latino student acceptance rose to 16.9%…

    • 1385 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Having educational institutions rely on funding from property taxes and other local revenue place minority communities who have historically been forced into low income neighborhoods and continue to be discriminated against in the job market no matter their qualifications at a disadvantage compared to their white counterparts. Even white people who are a part of a low income, underserved neighborhood fair better in education because they do not have negative stereotypes automatically assigned to them that discourages teachers from helping the students realize their full potential. These disadvantages can dishearten students from pursing or completing higher education, leading to their underemployment because they do not meet the standards of the employer and inability to better their neighborhood and school systems for the next generation. This cycle can only be broken by encouraging unbiased testing, minority financial aid, and a new policy that will allocate funds equally between public elementary…

    • 925 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Education is a vital tool to economic security. However, Melissa Marschall (1997) has found that current policies demonstrate minorities have been denied equal access to education. She has found that assignment systems based on assessments of language deficiencies or other individual needs are used to separate non-whites from whites. According to Jeffrey J. Mondack and Diana C. Mutz (1997), inequitable school financing is equally detrimental to non-white students. Funding for public schools comes from property taxes. They go along to say that predomintly non-white schools tend to be in central inner city school districts which have a smaller property tax…

    • 2340 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Segregation is still a big problem in the United States. Discrimination impacts African Americans by decreasing their pay, and by supplying them with less work benefits. According to Woodruff, a personal finance correspondent, “The average 401(k) balance for black workers enrolled in 401(k) plans in 2010 was $7,557, nearly half as much as white workers and barely unchanged from 2007. And for those blacks who are saving, they are 9% more likely to dip into their 401(k) contributions- more than four times as often as white” (Woodruff). The wage gap between African Americans and Caucasians has increased more and more each year, while being supplied with more taxes and less benefits. Another reason people believe African Americans get paid less is because of failing to receive a proper education. However, many African Americans get a subordinate education because of prejudice in the school system. According to Kohli, an editorial fellow at quartz, “The district had 6,622 students—38 percent of them black and 49 percent white—as of June 2013. But at every level where students are tracked, black students were underrepresented in higher-level classes” (Kohli). African Americans are being placed in lower level classes because of tracking, a biased system for class placement. Therefore, they are receiving an inferior education…

    • 1272 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays