10.15.10
Posted in General at 10:34 pm by Travis
One of the marketing points of “Waiting for Superman” was that America was ranked 25th behind other nations in math. According to Bracey’s report, we were 24th. Most people see that as proof that America’s schools are failing and somehow teachers and unions are the blame, but if you look closer, you will see a familiar theme that keeps occurring in the school reform argument.
Last year, we lost one of our great crusaders in educational research, Gerald Bracey. Gerald Bracey was a no nonsense researcher who could go toe to toe with the best of them, and he pulled no punches particularly because of his thorough research. I would suggest his final book, “Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality“. Ironically, Dr. Bracey revealed this interesting fact over a year before “Waiting for Superman”. If you look at the data of the U.S. through the lens of poverty, you will see that the American students who were in schools with the least amount of poverty scored higher than their foreign counterparts. In fact, 25% of the American students scored higher than the highest scoring nations.
According to Dr. Bracey’ s Report,
Many critics cite the performance of American students on international comparisons of mathematics and science. The most often used comparison comes from rankings on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Most recently (2006), American students ranked 24th of 30 OECD nations in mathematics and 17th of 30 in science. A publication from OECD itself observes that if one examines the number of highest-scoring students in science, the United States has 25% of all high-scoring students in the world (at least in “the world” as defined by the 58 nations taking part in the assessment—the 30 OECD nations and 28 “partner” countries). Among nations with high average scores, Japan accounted for 13% of the highest scorers, Korea 5%, Taipei 3%, Finland 1%, and Hong Kong 1%. Singapore did not participate.
The picture emerging from this highest-scorer comparison is far different than that suggested by the frequently cited national average comparisons; it is a picture that suggests many American schools are actually doing very well indeed. Of course, the U.S. is much larger than these other countries and should be expected to produce larger numbers of successful students. But it is only when we look beyond the mean and consider the distribution of students and schools that we see the true picture. Students attending American schools run the gamut from excellent to poor. Well-resourced schools serving wealthy neighborhoods are showing excellent results. Poorly-resourced schools serving low-income communities of color do far worse. Where is it, then, that improvement is needed?
How long will we ignored the fact that we have allowed some of our schools to languish in poverty, and now we want to introduce high stakes testing and say that teachers and unions are to blame. No, economic policy and complicity have allowed many of our schools to under-perform, and instead of assisting our communities to help themselves. It bothers me to see people in the trailer saying that if they don’t get into a “good” school they have no hope of a better education. Black folks’ hope of better education has always resided in themselves and their ability to build in their communtiy where they were to provide what they need. What is it about 2010 that has changed? If your school is under-performing, change it. If resources and funding are lacking, demand a change. A group of folks in the 60′s made the whole world stand up and take notice to their issue. What makes this day any different.
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10.10.10
Posted in General at 3:52 pm by Travis
I don’t know how much more I can take. First, the attack on the teachers and teacher unions, now some are attacking schools to find a solution to cyberbullying. Legislators are passing laws. Interviews, talk shows, who has the answer? Well, let’s take a moment to take a step back. Cyberbullying has become the gun control issue of the 21st century. Remember, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Many are blaming the facilitating technology and education particularly because this is where the problem is manifesting, but if we look closer, we will see that the problem has existed long before the Internet and Web 2.0.
The root cause of cyberbullying is simply this, self-esteem. Hurt people, hurt people. When we feel inadequate about ourselves we project our insecurities on others as a means of compensation. What has cause this issue to flourish is a multitude of problems in our society along with the ability to speak and influence millions of people with a key stroke, and you have a “perfect storm” for this thing to manifest. In nature, some diseases are not cause by parasitic invasion, but rather deficiencies that weaken the body allowing it to be subject to things that naturally are not a problem.
Let’s look at what we have accomplished over the past few years. Incomes have fallen greatly over the past several decades due to unequal distribution of labor and pay, more people are working longer at more jobs for lest money. I don’t have to tell you what this does to low income families, yes, low income folk have families. Remember the latch key kids? Now multiply that by a factor of 100. I have worked in schools where kids were left to their own devices to get themselves and their siblings to schools because the parent or parents work 3rd shift. The parents weren’t home when they left for school or when they got out. Now to the other side of the track. We have become so obsessed with profit or economic growth that we call loss as one writer puts it only as “negative growth”. Parents climbing the corporate ladder to get more and more while not counting up what it is really costing them over the long term. House on the hill, fine cars in the driveway, the best public, private or charter schools. What can go wrong? The irony is that as much as web2.0 and collaborative technologies seem to bind us more and more everyday, we are more disconnected from each other as every. Parents often have no clue of what their children are dealing with because our concentration is on either giving them the best of everything or making sure they survive. This disconnection forces children to figure out life on their own or at least what television and now the Internet, tell them who they are.
The problem they run into is dealing with the fact that they don’t look like what the collective says they should look like. “I don’t have the things that the collective says I should have”, but someone else does. Their life seems so perfect while mine sucks. There is a educational documentary out that rivals “Waiting for Superman”. It’s called “Race to Now where”. This film deals with the pressures that we have extended to our children in our attempt to have competition in our schools. Suicides and other issues that aren’t talked about until they hit epidemic proportions. We are busy preparing for the 21st century(We are already 10 years in). Being the “best” (whatever that is)at everything. I think that it’s also ironic that many of the digital captains of industry that are behind the reforms never finished college, but they’re rich so who cares. We have done away with physical education. Child obesity rates are through the roof. We have done away with music and art. Programs that allow a healthy and much needed avenues for self expression. Now we have bench marks and common standards and AYP none of which mean anything to children. Those terms were created by adults for adults. Frankly, I don’t know why we even have the kids come to school anymore; it’s not about them. It stopped being about the kids decades ago.
But here comes the iPhone, Twitter, Facebook, the Internet, 3G and 4G networks. The technology says, “I will listen to your issues. I will help you soothe your pain. I will help you to become whoever you want to be because on the Internet troubles are nothing but a keystroke to deal with. So she thinks she’s pretty. I can help you with that. If only people know what you saw them do at the party the other night. Upload it, become the hero and people will thank you for exposing these phonies”. The downward spiral begins. Lives shattered, people embarrassed and in worst cases, someone takes their life. All because someone in the real world never told them they loved them, made them feel loved or bothered to listen. Someone in the real world never told them that their uniqueness was an asset. They were never told that God loves diversity that’s why he made so much of it. We thought that they were okay. They had cell phones. They understood technology. They were masters. They had it all under control when in reality they were out of control.
What do we do? India Arie says, “Come Back to the Middle”. Put down the cell phones, stop the text messages and talk. Churches stop being so involved in rooting out socialist, homosexuals and abortionist and stand in the gap to heal the disconnect in our families and communities. I can’t let the schools off the hook totally. Embrace these technologies as part of the core curriculum and use the ISTE National Educational Technology (NETS) standards as part of your vision for technology integration. One of which is Digital Citizenry. While we are teaching them to become tech leaders in the 21st century, teach them how to do it so that we all benefit so we don’t lose any more children and students to this foolishness. Peace.
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09.24.10
Posted in General at 6:27 pm by Travis
Emotions are running high. The sight of all of the poor inner city youth being held hostage in failing schools brings up a well of emotion, but wait there is an answer. Leave those dilapidated centers of “race to the bottom” schools and come on over the the promise land of charters, no unions and good jobs. If this sounds oversimplified then you are right. Oversimplification, innuendo and slogans are what surrounds this whole campaign because if they looked at real data, research and history, we would see a much different picture. This country has never had a problem with educating minorities as long as the shots were called by someone else. Funding was never a problem to create workers for an industry. It was when we stood up for empowerment were we punished with segregation. The fact that we are not being encouraged to fight as a community to change our schools or that the hope for quality education can not exist within the walls of our community governed by us, disturbs me. Remember community organizing? Have we turned our back on this resource now that we have a black president? I am weary of anyone who does not first seek to empower you where you are. It’s like Dr. King and the civil rights pioneers deciding to just move everybody up north as a means of fighting discrimination.
This reminds me of history. Author/Professor Joel Spring does an excellent job of documenting the history of minorities in education in his book, “Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States”
In the book , he talks about the period after the Civil War when the country wanted the land that the Indians possessed, but they knew that getting them to give it up was not going to be easy. They could not force an open conflict with them having just come out of the Civil War, so they devised another way of getting their land, education and deculturization. Get them to see the value of their land in a different light. Change their perception of empowerment and watch them give away the store. Education was the key to making this happen. This real argument over school reform should be more ab0ut “what” is being taught and not just by who. It seems that the prevailing thought is this. Make economic development the corner stone of the argument while totally ignoring economic empowerment or at least redefine it, add some educational celebrities, a couple of billionaires and minority communities will do whatever we want.
Dr. Carter Woodson said it best, “If you control what a man thinks, you never have to worry about his actions.” The government at that time was not interested in Native American empowerment. They wanted their land. By being so quick to leave our public schools and close them, we are giving away our true power to choose. We are marching our communities and kids onto reservations under the notions of “better” education based on someone’s definition of learning through metrics. Your culture and history do not matter anymore because it’s all about globalization. Just get the test scores, and you will be on your way to a better life. The better life is then defined by a people with a much narrower view of themselves. They have marginalized their true abilities because they lack the wealth of their history and culture to support their consciousness.
No one asks what happens to the property that the “failing” schools use to sit on in our neighborhoods. The folks one a certain side of D. C don’t care about hundreds of teachers being fired because they don’t live in their communities. They are nameless faces in a crowd, but who cares. We are going to the promise land of charters and metrics and teachers who love us because of their merit pay. Principals that won’t let those mean and evil unions keep us from becoming what America has already defined for us. How do we define education as the civil rights issue of our day under these agendas? This is what Dr. King died for? The ability for someone else to define what my level of engagement is and the redefinition of social justice in my own community?
Do we really want those good low paying jobs that aren’t already being taken by people from Indian and China that bad? You see, choice is a relative term. Giving you a choice, but controlling what choices you have is merely the sequel of separate but equal. It’s like a multiple choice question with only one answer to pick from. Education was always about civilizing minorities and making them palatable to agendas, never for empowerment. Whenever we sought to be empowered, funding was cut or a budget crisis ensued and the resource dried up.
So after seeing the movie and being moved to tears, and before you load up the truck to move to Be-ver-ly, look at these suggested readings that the Superman folks and the corporate funded media refuse to acknowledge.
Suggested Readings
Sage Publication is giving free access to journals until Oct. 15. Sign up and you can get this free.
So while you all are teary eyed this weekend, I will be watching the real “Waiting for Superman” movie. The one that this issue is truly about. “Wallstreet: Money never Sleeps”
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04.25.10
Posted in General at 3:36 pm by Travis
Back in 2007, I was attending my second National Educating Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta. I was a part of the Digital Equity Special Interest Group. The guest speaker was Dr. Sylvia Rousseau, Professor of Clinical Education; Rossier School of Education Ed.D., Pepperdine University, California. She remarked about the sordid history that we have with technology and how the arenas of technology and education have played host to the constructs of race, gender and class from the beginning. There has been a push for some time now to marginalize the struggles of African Americans. I posted to this blog a while back a GAO report on the condition and demise of black radio which is so important to the types of conversations that we have in our communities. Efforts were made in the late 1990′s to not only keep minority ownership at a minimum, but diminish the existing owners. Even when it was financially advantageous to sell stations to minority owners, Congress responded by eliminating the tax deferment for the buyers to further dissuade the selling of stations. One constantly hears the same rhetoric day in and day about excuses. Blacks need to stop making excuses for not achieving at higher levels in education and excuses in not becoming financially independent and stop depending on the government for what they should be able to do for themselves.
This attitude is in part what Kinder and Sears calls “Symbolic Racism” that somehow minorities break the moral code of white, protestant America and have become the symbols of laziness and immoral behavior. If they lived better, they could do better, essentially. This theme is constantly being broadcast in political forums especially as it relates to the school reform and achievement gap debates. The attitude of most reformers is that minority children just aren’t working hard enough and teachers are not doing enough to make it happen. The non-educational issues that surround and influence everything from behavior to assessments are irrelevant. So when I read the latest writings of Dr. Henry Louis Gates concerning whose to blame for slavery, I find myself not entirely in a state of disbelief. For everything that Dr. Gates proposes in his articles, he has to anchor with the reference to excuses as a means to marginalize factors that are not most apparent in order to make his case. Just as most of these school reformers who claim that they, and they alone truly love children. It’s sort the old Red Fox routine of “Who are you going to believe me or you own lying eyes?”
First, many true historians will tell you that slavery as it existed in those cultures at that time was far different from the chattel slavery on America. Even the term slave had a totally different meaning as it related to status, treatment and overall outcome of that person’s life. Chattel slavery would not dare to allow a “slave” to have status that the African slave had. Dr. Gates questions how the Europeans were able to access this human capital so easily if not by the willing hand of African tribes willing to sell their countrymen seeing that interior exploration of the country had not yet begun. In his article he stated,
“For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests…
Herbert J. Foster wrote an article in 1979 in The Journal of Black Studies titled” Partners or Captives in Commerce?: The Role of Africans in Slavery”. In it he references Basil Davidson who wrote about the distinctions between African and European/American slavery.”
Davidson writes,
“The slave was not an agricultural or an industrial laborer but a personal servant, who, when serving a wealthy master, enjoyed great advantages and social status…Europeans trading along the Guinea coast during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often had to deal with men described as “slaves”; who were serving as agents of inland kings… Europeans found it difficult to understand how “slaves”-who, as they understood the term, were beneath contempt-could wield so much authority and command the consumption and disposal of so much wealth… Davidson also writes, “This was not slavery as Europeans understood the word: chattel slavery, the stripping from a man of all his rights and property-but serfdom, vassalship, ’domestic slavery’.”
How is this for irony? Foster also references Martin Robinson Delaney who was a Harvard-trained physician and explorer and was the first black to be commissioned by President Lincoln as a major in the army with field rank. He traveled to Africa between July of 1859 and August of 1860. In his book entitled,”Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party”, Delaney was quoted as saying,
“It is simply preposterous to talk about slavery, as that term is understood, either being legalized or existing in this part of Africa. It is nonsense. The system is a patriarchal one, there being no actual difference, socially between slaves (called by their protector sons or daughters) and the children of the person with whom they live. Such persons intermarry and frequently become the heads of state.”
Dr. Gates spotlights several kingdoms in West Africa who had a “considerable” role in the slave trade one of which was the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana. English explorer Robert Sutherland Rattray from his book, “Ashanti Law and Constitution” also referenced by Foster stated,
“A slave might marry; own property; himself own a slave; swear an oath; be a competent witness; and ultimately become heir to his master…. Such briefly were the rights of an Ashanti slave. They seem in many cases practically the ordinary privileges of an Ashanti free man…. An Ashanti slave in nine cases out of ten, possibly became an adopted member of the family, and in time his descendants so merged and intermarried with the owner’s kinsmen that only a few would know their origin.”
This is add more evidence to the fact that chattel slavery and the African system of slavery were two totally different constructs on many different levels. The parallels of African slave structure and European feudal systems, in my opinion, was an open door for the European exploitation of African nations. It is what they did with this open door, and what was used to keep the door open is the focal point of my post, technology. Foster believed that culturally both societies were equal when they met . It was the introduction of European technology that upset the balance of power in West Africa(Foster, 1979). The technology of firearms. Doesn’t this theme sound way too familiar? From guns to drugs to the digital divide, the use of new technology has had a devastating effect on certain societies. Foster goes on to reveal that the guns destabilized the balance of power in the African nations. The technology of firearms gave it’s possessor incredible power at that time. It meant bringing a gun to a knife fight, literally.
Guns were traded for slaves. Other tribes wanted this new technology and were willing to trade slaves for the guns. The introduction of this technology produced a desperation among the tribes to do whatever they had to for survive to stop involvement in the gun for slaves arrangement would have meant obliteration for your kingdom. Of course, they should take full responsibility for their actions, but I guess because they lack the moral fortitude to say no, they were willing to participate in the slave trade without prejudice as Dr. Gates and others would have us to believe. Europeans and African joint mercenary raids provided two things. A defeated enemy for the Africans and slaves for the Europeans to sell in the slave trade (Foster, 1979).
European machine technology allowed them to mass produce iron and textiles far better and faster than the Africans. This is what I think is the most devastating part of this trade. As the Europeans introduced these products to the Africans, it undermined their ability to produce them on their own. By trading slaves for these materials, the African nations began to see the erosion of these skills over time which would make them even that more dependent on the Europeans for survival. These skill sets were also interwoven into the fabric of the society as a whole, so what we begin to see is the destruction of the African culture on two fronts, the killing of the African people and the dismantling of the African culture. Another major problem for these types of arrangements is the dependency that both parties became locked into. Foster states that anywhere between 100,000 to 150000 guns were exported to Africa by the gun manufacturers with Africa not seeing any of the profit that would have grew the country, but instead created a economical and social deficit that is still seen today. The Europeans questioned the wisdom of arming the African people with so much weaponry, but they eventually got past there concerns due to the enormous profit and the threat of competition if they stopped (Davidson, 1961).
What Dr. Gates fails to mention is that many of the kings took a stand against the growing problem of guns for slaves and tried desperately to stop it. Foster again references Davidson in which King Affonso of the Congo wrote to John III of Portugal.
Affonso also complained that his country was being “utterly depopulated by thieves” and “men of evil con-science” who grab his people and cause them to be
sold … “it is our will that in these kingdoms there should not be any trade in slaves nor market for slaves.”
King Agaja of Fon took a more direct approach by conquering the coastal kingdoms that were raiding his to stop the exporting of slaves (Foster, 1979).
My focus in this post was not to debate Dr. Gates but rather bring clarity to what was said. It is ever so important in this hour that we have information to make quality judgments. We have the internet. Use it to research and not just make Facebook and Twitter post, and if you do, make most of your postings something of substance.
References used in this post
FOSTER, H. J. (1976). “Partners or Captives in Commerce?: The Role of Africans in the Slave Trade”. Journal of Black Studies, 6, 421.
DAVIDSON, B. (1971) “Slaves or captives? Some notes on fantasy and fact,” in Nathan Huggins et al. (eds.) Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience. Vol.
1. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
— (1966) A History of West Africa. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor.
— (1961) The African Slave Trade. Boston: Little, Brown.
DELANEY, M. R. (1861) Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party. New York: J. Hamilton.
RATTRAY, R. S. (1929) Ashanti Law and Constitution. London: Oxford Univ. Press.
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04.17.10
Posted in General at 3:39 pm by Travis
Stop looking for an iPad killer. The issue is who will be the strongest contender. It seems that we are about to hit a tsunami of tabless in the next coming months, and I predict that many will make a strong showing at ISTE 2010 in Denver. Particularly, those who are planning to get into ed-tech. If you are marketing the classroom without walls, paperless classroom scenario than what better place to be than the premiere educational technology convention where thousands of tech coordinators, teachers and administrators will be. Yes, administrators, people who write the checks. Who will be the best opponent to take on Apple? HP has a lot of potential, but the Moby’ s price point of $99 is very appealing to these schools wanting a 1 to 1 solution in the face of more cutbacks. Decisions. Decisions. Decisions.
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04.06.10
Posted in Education at 9:02 am by Travis
Diane Ravitch – A new agenda for school reform – washingtonpost.com.
This is an excellent article uncovering the shear ignorance, misrepresentation and oversimplification of educational reform. Parents, I hope you read this article and allow it to be the basis for your continuing education on education and reform. It’s time out for speeches, half-truths, and catch phrases. Everybody loves children, not just the “reform at any cost” crowd. The RAAC crowd do not love children any more than anybody else.
If you truly love children, then inform parents and the community with real knowledge about what it take to educate a child not just hit a benchmark number. Remember, there is a difference between achievement and true learning. Inform the people instead of catch phrases to make them feel good while capitalizing on their ignorance.
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03.28.10
Posted in General at 5:05 pm by Travis
I have been watching a lot of post of twitter concerning education reform, failing school, sorry teachers, school closure and student achievement. I saw a post recently where a parent was quoted as saying that they would drive to the moon for the best education. It’s funny how we will go to such extremes for what we think is a good deal. No real knowledge, no real understanding, but rather what someone has told me is a good deal. You really don’t know anymore, there than you did you at your previous school about what quality education is about, but their test scores are through the roof so they must be doing something right. Their teachers work on the weekends for free so they must really care about the students. What I am talking about is the lack of knowledge about what education is really about and how the people who desperately need to know it the most, don’t , nor do they realize that they need to.
I think we confuse inclusion with integration. It’s not enough to be at the table, but what are you bringing to the table? The day of dropping our kids off in kindergarten and picking them up in the 121th grade are over!. It’s time out for just sending our kids to school to get a good education. We must make sure that they are getting that education and not just a good grade or benchmark score. There is a fire sale on schools. Everything must go, but a good deal of them are in our neighborhoods, but that’s okay. What bothers me about all of this rhetoric on school reform is that it sounds a lot like assimilation. See if you remove enough of certain symbols and structures within a group’s culture or community, they will become submissive to anything eventually. This is how education was used from the beginning of our relationship with this country and much has not changed since then. Gloria Ladson-Billings refers this and other similar issues in her article , “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools”
She refers to a conversation with Professor Emeritus Robert Haveman of the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Economics, La Follette Institute of Public Affairs, and Institute for Research on Poverty, he stated:
The education debt is the foregone schooling resources that we could have (should have) been investing in (primarily) low income kids, which deficit leads to a variety of social problems (e.g. crime, low productivity, low wages, low labor force participation) that require on-going public investment. This required investment sucks away resources that could go to reducing the achievement gap. Without the education debt we could narrow the achievement debt.
We know more about Tiger Woods’ mistresses than what a good, quality, differentiated curriculum looks like. We give more thought and input to the voting and scoring process of “American Idol” than what the NAEP, SAT and state scoring “really” says about how are kids are doing, the current and future trends and what constitutes as failure. But the car is all gassed up to take a trip to the moon. I could never understand why black folks who never became involved in any form with their “failing” neighborhood school went across town to a charter school and baked cookies, parked cars and volunteered time they didn’t have in the own neighborhood. Recently Bill Maher was criticized by many for saying “fire the parents” when it comes to school reform. While I don’t think it is to that extreme, I think that there is something to be said about parent involvement beyond coming to a play, concert or sporting event. We as parents should know what makes good education inside and outside the classroom. In Ladson-Billings article, she categorizes several “debts” that contribute to the overall eduction debt. They being
- historical
- economic
- socio/political
- moral
We should be trying to control as much of the educational landscape of our communities as possible instead of abdicating to someone else’s philosophy of how we should and can be educated. If we would study history we would see the need. Since I am talking about our response to our “failing” neighborhood schools and getting those frequent-flyer miles to the moon, I want to point to something she said in the article as part of the section on socio/political debt.
As a result of the sociopolitical component of the education debt, families of color have regularly been excluded from the decision making
mechanisms that should ensure that their children receive quality education. The parent–teacher organizations, school site councils, and other possibilities for democratic participation have not been available for many of these families. However, for a brief moment in 1968, Black parents in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of New York exercised community control over the public schools. African American, Latina/o, Native American, and Asian American parents have often advocated for improvements in schooling, but their advocacy often has been muted and marginalized.
We should know what test scores mean thoroughly instead of the “Gong Show” version we see on television. We might as well hire those judges to assess our schools and tell us who’s the best and who’s not because we have so oversimplified school reform.
Do this. At the New Moon School District look and ask for these things.
- Diversity Statement apart from the school vision and mission statement
- Ask if there is a diversity committee and what is done through out the year to address, recognize and celebrate the diversity of the school.
- Ask someone qualified to explain differentiation in the classroom and ask to observe your child’s classroom and look for it.
- Ask to see lesson plans.
- Find out what percentage of the kids that graduate have to take remedial courses once they get to college and how many have actually graduated from college.
- Ask about the highest level of degrees among teachers at the school and what is in place to increase it.
- Ask about the diversity of the teaching and administrative staff. Does it reflect the school population? Does the school board reflect the community’s population?
- Find out if there is a discipline disparity
- Ask about the dropout rate and what dropout prevention process is in place
- Then ask yourself, why didn’t I ask these questions of my “failing” neighborhood school before I abandoned it.
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03.24.10
Posted in Digital Divide at 9:17 am by Travis
IPad Subscriptions Could Boost Mag Circulation – BLACK ENTERPRISE.
Where are the black magazine & newspaper iPhone and web apps? There is something wrong with this picture. Technology is one way to overcome the obstacles in the real world, but getting on the forefront of the technology is crucial. It’s time that we start creating our own paths and stop waiting for others to chart the territory first, then jump on board. You have fewer opportunities to dictate the terms when you wait. Black magazines are all talking about the effect that iPad could have on magazine, all the apps you can get for your iPhone, but they don’t have an app, nor do they seem to have a plan for one. Essence Magazine even had an article iPhone Apps for Ladies but no Essence iPhone/iPad app seems to be in the works. The only black magazine app I have seen is Black Men Magazine. Essence, Ebony/Jet, Black Enterprise please tell me that you have these products in development and that we are not going to sit back and “see” how well the iPad does before we jump on board. “CP” time with technology is not cool at all and can be extremely costly.
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03.10.10
Posted in Education at 6:43 am by Travis
“The policy center concluded that the restructuring models promoted by Obama are an improvement over No Child Left Behind but warned that because they include “specific directives that are not supported by research, it is unwise to prescribe them” to schools. “The federal government should be careful about directing people to do things when it doesn’t have the evidence,” says center President Jack Jennings.”
via Firing teachers: First step to reform or useless effort? – USATODAY.com.
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02.03.10
Posted in General at 9:41 pm by Travis
The first thing we do is start highlighting black figures that we have never heard of. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with this, but I believe that “hindsight is 20/20″. In other words, to clearly see the present you have to look at the past. Dr. Carter Woodson who we consider the father of Black History Month wrote a deeply thought provoking book that many quote the title of, but have never read, “The Mis-Education of the Negro“. Although this text was published in 1935, it is highly relative and prophetic for today’s issues surrounding black America. Anybody who is especially interested in educational reform would do good to read this book or even buying the audio book for your iPod/iPhone/Touch/iPad or whatever you listen to these days. So this month’s lesson people is go and read The Mis-Education of the Negro and then tell me if you agree with what many are calling educational reform, empowerment, and post-racial America. Peace
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