Lecture 10: “The Forgotten Half”
In the last topic the focus was on the types of curriculum modifications we should have in order to level the playing field for the non-academic students. The SCANS report and the basic curriculum outlined therein are really the way to go for the 21st century. Students need to be taught how to figure out where things are going so they can do the kinds of things that will allow them to consolidate their view of the world and where they fit into it.
Today we are going to about some of the elements that create that forgotten half. What are some of the things that stand in the way of people getting themselves organized to go on to college?
One of the things that we need to come up with and understand is that the school needs to be aware of the social limitations students face. What I mean by that is that oftentimes teachers, because of our own backgrounds, will assume that all of their kids will have similar backgrounds. Teachers need to understand that their view of the world and their own experience is not necessarily the experience of their kids.
One of the biggest social limitations people have to deal with is poverty. Today one of the things I want to convince you of is that people really don't understand poverty. I'll be delighted if I am wrong, but let me share with you my definition of poverty.
Financial Poverty
The easiest kind of poverty to understand is the poverty of dollars. People who just don't have enough money to make ends meet. If you don't have money there are a whole lot of things you can't do. The end of the line of that problem is that people don't have enough to eat, and often don't have a place to stay. Now please notice that financial poverty is the easiest kind of poverty to solve. Our welfare system has solved a big portion of this problem. My point is that even when people have enough to eat and a place to stay it does not necessarily eliminate their other kinds of poverty.
Poverty of Aspiration
Financial poverty can often lead to a poverty of aspiration. These peoples' attitude is that it really doesn't make any difference what they do; they are never going to have the kind of job that will allow them to participate fully as a citizen in society. That kind of poverty, poverty that causes people to give up and accept themselves permanently on welfare, is tougher to deal with than financial poverty. These feelings can often lead to a poverty of spirit because people tend to give up on life in general.
Poverty of Decision
The poverty of decision-making is one type of poverty that can be seen most directly affecting the forgotten half in class. This poverty is when people just don't know how to make good decisions. This lack of decision-making skills plays a major role in how many of these students get used to living their lives.
Poverty of Support Systems
Another type of poverty that is linked with the others listed here is poverty of support systems. This type of poverty makes solving seemingly simple problems quite difficult. For example, if I have a flat tire, I have a lot of choices in how to fix it. My first choice is that I can borrow my wife's car and ask her to get the tire fixed because we have triple AAA. Even if we didn't have AAA all we have to do is get out the jack, put on the spare tire and in fifteen minutes we're on our way. The net cost to anybody in terms of inconvenience is a maximum of a couple of phone calls and two or three minutes of time. Now, one of my students once had a flat tire and as a result he missed school for three days. That is the difference in support systems. He didn't have AAA and no spare tire around in a second car. So he had to stay home with his little brothers and sisters while his mother went out to try and solve the problem of getting a spare. For the well-off person a flat tire is a minor inconvenience, but for a person in poverty it is a major disruption.
That poverty of support systems comes right up to you guys in college. If you have parents who went to college you have a better support system right now than if your parents didn't. The irony is that the people most in need of the support systems are the people who have the least support systems.
Poverty of support systems is a big deal, and where this influences teachers is that teachers have to understand that not all of their kids have the same support systems, and not all kids come from homes with the same aspiration level.
Because of a variety of feelings from inferiority to, many of the forgotten half will try to find an escape in drugs or alcohol.
Let me tell you another story about a grant that I directed for about three years. This is a grant that was designed to deal with drug prevention. The population that we decided to pick had to do with kids in the fifth and sixth grade whose older siblings had been in trouble with the law had had a substance abuse problem and had one parent or more with a substance abuse problem.
We had a three-year program in Chesapeake where we worked with the probation office to provide help for these little kids. We would go and tutor them in the schools, we would get ODU athletes to take them to games and we got local businesses to give them special attention and provide support for them. The program really worked.
So why did the program stop? The money ran out, and in general people are not very consistent in terms of seeing things through. Here was a population of kids who everyone agreed was at tremendous risk, and that the kind of support that they were getting really could potentially make a difference in their lives. Now we are not even following them anymore.
Now let's go back and look at substance abuse specifically. One of the real big problems here is that society itself sends mixed messages. When we put signs around schools saying "drug free zone" aren't we advertising the fact that our society isn't taking the laws about drugs seriously outside school limits? Also, many parents participate in things that we are trying to stop our kids from doing. Codependence also becomes a major factor in dealing with substance abuse. Codependence is where a person with a relative or a friend who is having a substance abuse problem often supports their problem unconsciously or consciously instead of helping the cure. It makes you part of the problem. Teachers have to worry about not becoming codependent with their students in terms of propping up situations that really shouldn't be propped up. We need to have huge efforts in terms of prevention of substance abuse and those efforts are going to be costly.
Institutionalized Racism & Sexism
Let's go on to another issue that directly affects the forgotten half, especially in the inner city. This is the issue of institutionalized racism and sexism. I am not talking about people who are "flaming racists," I am talking about all of us who just act according to what ordinarily goes on in the implicit discrimination within the status quo. Doing things the way they have always been done props up a racist society.
I want to tell you a story. I have been arrested once in my life and this was when I was Dean of Education at the University of Massachusetts. I was sitting in my office one day and these two gentlemen came up and said, "You are under arrest." So I got up, and they said "we've got to put the handcuffs on," and I was alarmed at how serious things were getting. So they cuffed me, and instead of going out the back door that was right there next to the office, they paraded me down the hall to the front door and the waiting police car. When we finally got to the police station I found out what was going on. It was an unpaid parking ticket in Summerville, Massachusetts. In hindsight it seems almost humorous, but at the time it wasn't very funny.
The bizarre part of the story is that when Brett, a student who had borrowed my car and was responsible for the ticket, got to the police station the next morning the case was dropped. It turned out that the bailiff of the court was the father of his old girlfriend. The actual reason I was arrested and paraded about was that the UMASS police had been really irritated with me because I had "ruined" their lives by bringing black people to the Pioneer Valley. We had more black students in the school of education than the whole rest of the University. This was because of our number one priority was to combat institutionalized racism.
Relevant to our discussion is the fact that institutionalized racism is still with us. This is why we need affirmative action, and we still need affirmative action if we are going to solve the problems of society. Bad affirmative action has been around too long. Promoting people to do a job that they are incompetent to do is stupid. But cutting someone some slack in terms of gaining the competence, helping them get the confidence or favoring a qualified minority, is the kind of affirmative action that I would like to have. One of the jobs you have as teachers, if you are really going to deal with the forgotten half, is to take on some of the implicit discrimination of the society, and help your students deal with it. While white people have either conscious or unconscious feelings of superiority, minorities have unconscious feelings of suspicion. With these feelings of come various conspiracy theories - theories that ought not to taken lightly because even if though some may seem implausible they are very real to the people who believe them.
If you were to take all the students in a class, and put everyone in a social situation the black students would naturally gravitate toward each other, and the white students would naturally gravitate toward each other. One of the reasons this happens is because you gravitate towards people you think you have something in common with, and you think you have something to talk about. So one of the things we have to do as teachers is to try and create situations that help overcome that remoteness.
Another issue facing designing a curriculum to take in the forgotten half is the issue of frills versus basics.
A high school in the upper-class suburb not only has the "basics" mastered but they also have all the frills and the sophistication of music, language and. They're sophisticated kids. Now, assuming momentarily we have an ideal, racist free society and two students end up competing for the same job. They both have good basic skills, but one is really sophisticated and the other isn't. Who's going to get hired? Obviously the sophisticated one will.
The real world works with sophistication, doesn't it? And art and music and literature are not "frills," they are part of the sophistication of the society. Neurology learning shows a synergism between the arts and the sciences. If you teach people a lot of sciences without the arts, you get a technician and not a scientist. Incidentally, teaching someone only the arts doesn't end in good results either. So we need both frills and basics if we are going to reach the forgotten half. Serving the forgotten half by just giving them good basics is just another kind of institutionalized racism.
Another problem is that often times the same requirements in school for different kids will produce different results. If you are in a family where you are using your sophistication all the time and you are engaging in philosophical discussions with your mother while studying such things in school, you will inevitably be a stronger person. That is why we need to make sure that the forgotten half at least gets this type of discussion in school. Think of it the other way around. How many academic kids would really like to have to study automobile mechanics as part of the frills for their education? Perhaps not many, but common sense would dictate that they would benefit immeasurably if they did. (Society just needs a higher degree of appreciation for vocational skills.)
Role Models and Counter-productive Incentives Another problem facing the forgotten half is the problem of .Too often times the ghetto kid has as a role model the successful drug dealer who's strutting around with fancy clothes and a car. Even if the ghetto kid decides to play it straight, the only real option to follow is to sling hamburgers at McDonalds for minimum wage. What would you choose in their exact same circumstances?
We also have the problem of counter-productive incentives. We sometimes give people the incentives for the wrong things, and if we don't understand the incentives systems that kids are working from, we are likely to not make very good decisions as teachers. For example, you may think you are giving a kid an unsatisfactory grade when the kid is very delighted with it, and these create all sorts of counter-productive incentives.
"Real Time" Remediation There are some easy steps a teacher can take in the classroom to help kids caught up in the forgotten half. One thing is "real time" remediation. When someone starts falling behind, that is the time to provide remediation and to really pile on the remediation until the kid has either mastered the material or until you know that there is nothing more you can do. The problem is that we don't have the resources right now in junior high or in elementary school to really provide the real time remediation necessary to support kids when they are having trouble. Instead of reteaching skills to students until they get them, those students who are slow are advanced through the curriculum at the same pace as their faster-learning peers. This means that their baggage of unlearned concepts amasses rapidly until it reaches a critical mass and the student is so far behind they are beyond conventional help.
Cooperative Learning
Another step teachers can try is cooperative learning. Cooperative learning is tough. The default position is simply to say "cooperative learning is too tough to pull off." Unfortunately that is the wrong answer because cooperative learning and learning from each other turns out to be one of the most powerful ways for people to learn. The problem is that cooperative learning has not become embedded in the instructional expectation of the society. We need to start looking at ways to develop powerful cooperative learning early on. Most of you have had some group experience, but some of you have never worked in groups before in terms of any large assignment. Because group work is not used regularly or effectively, it becomes something people worry about or they feel is somehow unfair.
Personal Support and Social Infrastructures Another teacher tactic is personal support. I think teachers need to do a whole lot more to provide special personal support for the students and to get personally involved in the lives of their students. That is one of our jobs. As I start to get to know students, I can find what special needs they have and try to address those needs.
Analyzing the social infrastructures students are involved in also helps in dealing with your students, especially the forgotten half. For the forgotten half these infrastructures are crucial and each situation has unique dimensions, problems and opportunities. Take, for example, school and community relations. Schools often times don't have very good relations with their community because they don't give a very high priority to working with their community. They just kind of do their own thing. When the school gets to crunch time, it is deprived of a lot of potential support that the community could provide if the community knew what was going on in the school and if the school took the time to keep the community informed.
Schedules:
Another problem is the problem of schedules. Scheduling is a problem because there are different forms of schedule that achieve very different things. Schools cannot seem to decide on one set schedule (this is one reason I argue for a national curriculum, do create compatible scheduling). There are two basic scheduling types - block scheduling (small intense classes that cover a years material in half a year) and standard scheduling (big slow moving classes that cover their material is a full year). In Virginia there is a strong emphasis on block scheduling.
The evidence is very strong that you learn more in a block schedule system than you do in the standard schedule. The reason for this is that in a block schedule the typical teacher will deal with 75 kids in a semester rather than 150. Teachers can really keep track of, and give a lot more personal attention to, 75 kids instead of 150.
However, block scheduling creates horrendous problems because right now in some school districts there are schools on block scheduling and other schools on standard scheduling. This means that if a student who is planning to take Algebra in the spring happens to change schools at Christmas, and the new school only teaches Algebra in the fall, then the student is suddenly a semester behind. The obvious solution is to standardize scheduling, but arguments for local control of schools prevent this from being done effectively.
Remember that the big picture today is something that is called the forgotten half. The bias is that there are a large number of students that the schools are not serving very well. I hope that I have at least convinced you of why I have that bias even if you haven't accepted it. The biggest job is not providing people with the vocational skills to make money; it's providing them with the decision-making skills with which to make a life. Remember we are talking about the poverty of decision-making and the poverty of support systems that have more to do with the poverty of life than simple economic conditions.
Poverty is the poverty of aspiration, the poverty of purpose, the poverty of decision-making, the poverty of support systems. As teachers, we need to help kids see beyond the dollar sign, beyond the fancy clothes they want to get when they are thirteen, beyond the fancy car they want to get when they're sixteen, beyond all the material badges of society. What we need to give them are the tools to ensure them a successful life. I hope that you understand from this discussion how complex our job is. There is no simple answer.