"When African American Children cry out for help by failing academically or acting out, who is responsible for them falling through the cracks? If you ask teachers, the parents are to blame. If you ask the parents, teachers are to blame. If you ask administrators, the fault lies with the lack of parental involvement and quality teachers. If you ask the community, schools are to blame. The truth is that it is everyone?s job to effectively guide African American students through their formative years to adulthood. Now ask yourself, which groups should be held accountable?"
Well, this almost gets it right--but not quite. What is left out is the basic concept of cultural reproduction, the idea that cultural and economic groups tend to reproduce themselves. Willis asks a very important question in Learning to Labor, "Middle class kids get middle class jobs and working class kids get working class jobs--so why do working class kids put up with it?" Willis' argument focuses on issues of working class high school students preparing to enter the labor force and how they work to recreate or reproduce the cultural mores of their parents. In the end, Willis encourages schools to alter their pedagogical approach by moving toward a more engaging, student-centered curriculum. The idea that engaged students will find ways to privilege school as a cultural value and therefore be able to overcome other cultural influences is compelling. One of my own mantras (found at the footer of this blog) is the notion that engaged teaching and learning must be so much fun that students don't know what they are doing is good for them is one that, when taken seriously, can have a positive impact on all children.
What is missing in American schools today is the notion of engagement. What has taken its place is TESTING and STANDARDS. The problem is that all this concentration on assessment and standards has the effect of removing valuable days from instructional time and transferring those days to either testing or preparation for testing. What a crying shame! No Child Left Behind is having the effect of leaving all children behind. Ken Goodman has even pointed out that teachers have subverted valuable tools in order to 'help' their students prepare for tests. Goodman points to primary teachers that have created word walls of nonsense words because nonsense words appear on a number of early literacy snapshots thereby subverting the very good, research bound, idea of the word wall into something that fails to support a rich literate environment in the classroom and is unproven in terms of research studies. Others note that from 50 to 60 instructional days in intermediate and upper grades are now devoted to either preparing for testing or to testing. That means that in a typical 180 day school year nearly 1/3 of the time is spent on assessment, the remainder of the time is spent on new learning. There is something perverse about this imbalance.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006510/5/prweb384480.htm:
Learning to Labor: "The unique contribution of this book is that it shows, with glittering clarity, how the rebellion of poor and working class kids against school authority prepares them for working class jobs.No American interested in education or in labor can afford not to read and study this book carefully." -- Stanley Aranowitz
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