I watched this video today and it helped me create some categories for the massive sense of dissatisfaction and anxiety over urban American education that I have been developing in the past year. Take a look.
For the 2011-2012 school year, I have been working in a charter school in the city of Buffalo, teaching science to 6th and 7th grade students. After private schools and honors programs skim off the top, many of my students are the brightest middle-schoolers in Buffalo. They are creative, talented, intelligent, hard-working, overwhelmingly immature, and frighteningly moldable. What bothers me is how useless this education is for the vast majority of them. Most are smarter than their peers and could be learning at a pace that far exceeds the average. Yet the State of New York mandates that we spent the first 7 months of a 9+ month school year teaching them from a 'core curriculum' that sets the standard for math and English at a pitifully low place. If 75% of the students could be learning at faster pace on their own and the other 25% need some sort of individualized education program, what is the use of having a classroom? Why have we arbitrarily separated students by 'date of manufacture' when most of them are at different stages of achievement in different subjects? Why are we trying to 'level' them all out to fit a state-mandated curriculum, when each one has unique skills, areas of interests, home environments or cultural heritages that would enable them to excel in certain areas and require that they have extra help in other areas? Why do we assume that an educational system designed to fit a white middle class protestant male is now just as functional when generalized to all socioeconomic classes, all races, all religions, and both genders?
