Posts Tagged school district
American public schools – still unequal (and racist) after all these years
this has been crossposted on several different blogs
In 1949, Black parents and children filed a law suit against the Board of Education in School District #22 in Clarendon County SC, noting the total inadequacy of facilities which were “unprotected from the elements . . .[with] no appropriate and necessary heating system, running water or adequate lights . . . and [with]an insufficient number of teachers and insufficent class spaces.” The white schools were of course more modern and better equipped. That suit led to Briggs v Eliot, one of the cases eventually combined into the landmark Brown v Board of Education case that found schools segregated by race “inherently unequal” and thus unconstitutional even according to the perverse “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v Ferguson.
If it sounds like all I am doing is retelling ancient history, consider this: in 1999 the South Caroline Supreme Court remanded a case to trial “based on gross differences in resources in the same still-segregated Clarendoun County schools – now serving the grandchildren of the original plaintiffs – and the predominantly White and wealthier districts.”
Tags: board of education, certification, children, college, course, curriculum, degree, education, educational, educational research, for students, high school, high school education, institute, instruction, learning, levels, masters, masters degree, minority, mortgage, mortgages, of education, parents, professional development, professor, program, public school, public schools, quality, research, s degree, scholar, scholars, school, school district, school finance, schooling, schools, score, scores, secretary of education, special, student, students, teach, teacher, teachers, teaching, the school, training, universityRelated posts
Garbage In, Garbage Out: School Lunch Programs in America
Tags: children, education, program, programs, school, school district, schools, student, studentsAs Janet Poppendieck writes in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, we live in “a new age in which a business model … permeate[s] school food.” Where lunchrooms in the past treated children as lucky recipients, they now view them as customers whose business must be won. Vending machines light up the hallways, usually through an exclusive contractual arrangement between school or school district and a company like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Fast-food operations like Subway and KFC set up shop in the food court, tempting away all the students with enough money to afford a hoagie or fried chicken strips. Alongside the traditional cafeteria meal are a la carte lines where burgers and French fries (and their unholy cousins, tater tots) glisten with grease under the lamplights, exempted in all their fatty glory from USDA nutritional requirements. Even those children who buy the standard hot meal eat mostly junk: pizza with fries hits all of the major food groups, if you define the groups expansively enough. As Ronald Reagan’s USDA famously taught us, ketchup is, after all, a vegetable.
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Creating a Democratic Learning Community
is the focus of a new book by Sam Chaltain, National Director of the Forum for Education and Democracy. Sam previously worked with the First Amendment Schools Project, an experience that helped shaped this book. He is also founding director of the Five Freedoms Project, which is a community educators, students and citizens committed to First Amendment Freedoms, democratic schools, and the idea that students should be seen and heard (and of which I am a member).
American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community has a Foreword by former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor – herself long committed to a revitalization of civic education – and is valuable both as something to read to provoke one’s thinking, and as a resource for further exploration of the topic, especially for anyone concerned about preparing our students to learn to be citizens of a democracy.
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