Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (43609)	11/21/2007 1:38:58 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540812

Can you explain what you mean by left brained academics failing to address right brained students?

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (43609)	11/21/2007 4:54:56 AM
From: KonKilo	Respond to of 540812

I'm convinced that one of the major obstacles to a more successful outcome rests on the failure of our left-brained educational system to address the needs of those students, many of them minority students, who are right-brained. In our pressing need to see everyone...male/female/black/latino/white/asian/native American... as primarily cookie-cutter kids I believe we do them a great disservice. As a former music teacher, I am in complete agreement. Although, I am also sympathetic to the view that education should prepare kids for adult life and let's face it, right-brained pursuits too often lead to poorly renumerated occupations as a general rule. It s a tough balance to strike.

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (43609)	11/21/2007 9:57:10 AM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 540812

I suspect that the problem with disparate educational opportunities will not be cured with equal funding, even slightly. It certainly won't hurt but most of the urban public schools that are struggling could receive the same level, or even a higher level, of funding and years later I expect they'd remain substantially under performing. I'd guess that many of us suspect that the problems lie much deeper, we just don't want to talk about the potential reasons for those problems because a long history of political correctness has prevented, and still prevents, an objective discussion of the many factors involved. Looks to me as if we've found a level of disagreement, Ed. I think it's lack of a national commitment. We, collectively, don't give a s**t, just hope the problem will go away. A large part of that argument is based on two sources: Jonathan Kozol's books. If you haven't read them, I recommend them. The second on some limited exposure to innovative inner city schools. This latter was eye opening. For about five years I ran a program at the college at which I taught which included NYC field trips to expose first year college students, privileged certainly, to the dilemmas of inner city life, the better to get them thinking less parochially. One of the constants in this was a visit to a standard Kozol illustrated, terribly depressing, inner city school. Plenty of those. The other was to visit at least two innovative, largely teacher run, experimental schools. The latter were eye openers for all of us. The one we started with was Central Park East but I learned it was part of a broader coalition, which in turn spun off a large group of innovative schools. And that NYC was bristling with innovation. (This, I should add, was, roughly, the middle 90s.) Central Park East, for instance, in its strongest incarnation, was sending inner city kids to some of the best colleges in the country. We took several where I taught and they did quite well. The last I knew the some members of the graduating class were going to Swathmore, Vassar, Cornell, Brown, etc. The biggest problems, however, these innovative schools faced were working their way outside controls of the central school administration (not local control as you are advocating but teacher control which puts it back into the professional argument) and funding (the two, obviously, work closely together). During the period I was privvy to what was going on, Central Park East and some of the other schools had sympathetic mid level administrators in the NYC system with budgetary authority who made this possible. What happened under Klein (Bloomberg's appointee) I don't know. But that experience convinced me that among the host of problems therein, we have not, as a nation, tried the one most amenable to intervention, which is a massively expanded experimentation with smaller class size, teachers who have more control over the classroom, and better facilities. If we were to do that and it failed, then I would have to assume that the other factors we all discuss were more important. To circle back, there are very powerful experimental models out there which have not been generalized because of beauracratic (sp??)inertia and lack of funding.