‘They Schools’

[Jahness]

‘They Schools’

By Will Okun


Photos by Will Okun


Will Okun is a Chicago school teacher who traveled with Nick Kristof in June to central Africa, on the win-a-trip contest. He blogged and vlogged as he went, and you can see his reports at www.nytimes.com/twofortheroad. He teaches English and photography in a Chicago school with many students from low-income and minority homes.


Picture of Will Okun

At a recent education conference, a veteran public school teacher from Detroit explained why she preferred teaching elementary school to middle or high school. “Not to say elementary schools are heaven, but there is still a sense of hope, a sense of possibility with the young ones. By middle school, it’s just a fight for control of the building’s hallways and classrooms. Control is more the priority than education,” she asserted.

“Eleven-year-olds are greeted at the doors with metal detectors and officers with wands. Highlighters, glue sticks and sharpies are confiscated because they are not allowed on the premises. We tell them to wait in lines as we escort them from locked rooms to locked bathrooms. Inside, a good classroom is a controlled classroom.

“We are not teaching them about their lives or their communities because it is not in the curriculum. Instruction is driven by standardized testing. We are teaching testing, not knowledge. No one hears these kids, nor do we try. There is absolutely no respect for these students. These middle schools are like prisons where the spirits of our children are slowly crushed, and I have been an unwilling participant in the destruction of young lives. Simply being witness and not speaking out daily makes me feel the soulful guilt of a thief,” concluded the veteran teacher.

We can only hope that this teacher is overstating her accusations, but I think she is accurately describing an academic experience common to many young students forced to attend the worst schools in our low-income urban communities. The teacher’s angry denouncements are echoed by the words and ideas of popular hip-hop group Dead Prez in their song, ‘They Schools.’ This Brooklyn based duo is probably the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed “political” rap group of this decade.

Here is how these spokesmen describe their high school years and their opinions of urban education in general:

“They Schools” [edited for language and space]
I got my diploma from a school called rickers
Full of teenage mothers and drug dealing ——–
In the hallways, the [police] was always present
Searching through possessions
Looking for dope and weapons
Get your lessons
That’s why my moms kept stressing
I tried to pay attention but they classes wasn’t interesting
They seemed to only glorify the Europeans
Claiming Africans were only three-fifths a human being
School is like a 12 step brainwash camp
They make you think if you drop out, you ain’t got a chance
To advance in life, they try to make you pull your pants up
Students fight the teachers and get took away in handcuffs
And if that wasn’t enough, then they expel y’all
Your peoples understand it but to them, you a failure
They may as well teach us extortion
You either get paid or locked up, the principal is like a warden
In a four-year sentence, mad ——– never finish
But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t be a doctor or a dentist
Cuz for real, a mind is a terrible thing to waste
And all y’all with y’all nose up …

We going to speak for ourselves
See the schools ain’t teaching us nothing
They ain’t teaching us nothing but how to be slaves and hard workers
For white people to build up they stuff
Make they businesses successful while it’s exploiting us
And they ain’t teaching us nothing related to
Solving our own problems
Ain’t teaching us how to get crack out the ghetto
They ain’t teaching us how to stop the police from murdering us
And brutalizing us, they ain’t teaching us how to get our rent paid
They ain’t teaching our families how to interact better with each other
They just teaching us how to build they [stuff] up,
That’s why we got a problem with this,
That’s why —— be dropping out … cuz it don’t relate,
Until … we control the school system
Where we reflect how we going to solve our own problems
Them we ain’t going to relate to school … that’s just how it is
And I love education
But if education ain’t elevating me, … then [expletive] education
At least they [schools].”

Although I do not subscribe to the whole of Dead Prez’s tirade, I do agree that many urban schools are training workers rather than developing thinkers or community-minded activists. Most students enter our classrooms intent on earning a high school diploma (or hopefully a future college degree) for the sole purpose of improving their ability to obtain more lucrative or stable employment.

The schools allow this passive mindset to fester. Our classes fail to foster intellectual curiosity. Our lessons are unable to motivate the students. We do not demand critical thinking. We do not offer materials that are relevant to the students’ lives or communities. Even on days when I am not drilling test-taking techniques, I do not understand why I am teaching certain material. How can urban schools not address the myriad problems plaguing the surrounding communities? Why are we not providing our students with the tools and the knowledge to impact change in their families and in their communities? Why do we not attempt to make education relevant?

Instead, many overworked teachers seek students’ submission through mindless busywork. We secretly bear witness to the veteran teacher’s observations and socially promote woefully uneducated children towards graduation. It is possible for a student to graduate high school with no academic abilities, critical thinking skills or social awareness. However, the roughly 50 percent of urban children who do reach graduation have demonstrated an ability to sedately sit at a desk for six to seven hours a day and dutifully perform often tedious and regimented assignments. These “molded” graduates are perfect for the menial labor force; too bad there are no jobs.

Here is the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf1QcHs4vGY for Dead Prez’ “They Schools,” but be warned of explicit lyrics.

Here is the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_bvT-DGcWw for Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, II.”

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/200...ml?ref=opinion

[Mamazen]

This article is very hotly debated as of late....


Monday, February 25, 2008
Detroit schools grad rate: 32%
DPS official questions MSU study that uses new national tracking method
Karen Bouffard /
The Detroit News
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll...02250382&imw=Y

Just 31.9 percent of Detroit students graduate in four years, according to the first major study in Michigan conducted using a method now mandated by the federal government.

The study, by the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University, looked at how many ninth-graders in Detroit and the state as a whole left high school with diplomas after four years. It portends what may happen in August, when Michigan releases the graduation rate for the class of 2007, which will be calculated for the first time using the same formula used by MSU researchers.

Detroit Public Schools officials would not comment on the study, which has not yet been published, but School Board President Carla Scott said she doesn't believe the results, which echo the findings of an Education Week study released in June. That study found fewer than a quarter of ninth-graders who entered Detroit Public Schools in 1999 graduated four years later.

According to the state Department of Education, the district's graduation rate for the same time frame was 66.8 percent.

"It doesn't seem credible to me," Scott said. "You can make data for anything you want it to say, but (they) should have factored in the reasons why they left.

"If you look at children moving out of the city, of course you're going to see a decrease. There are all kinds of reasons why children leave the city, that doesn't mean they're dropouts."

Statewide, the new study found the graduation rate in 2006 -- 72.9 percent -- was significantly lower than the state Department of Education's 85.7 percent graduation rate for the class of 2006, the last year for which data is available.

Sharif Shakrani, director of the Education Policy Center at MSU and the author of the study, said researchers looked at the total number of freshmen in Detroit Public Schools in fall 2002 and then in each subsequent year through June 2006.

They took into account the number who moved to charter schools or to other districts in the state, where records were available.

There was no way to determine how many of the children moved out of state or transferred to private schools without a uniform identification system to track students, Shakrani said. It also didn't take into account students who graduate in five years.

Eight states already have such a system, which is under development in Michigan.

The study found an even lower graduation rate for boys enrolled in Detroit Public Schools: just 25 percent, compared with 39 percent of girls -- a discrepancy that mirrors national trends.

Jack Jennings, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, said large urban areas across the country have reported "shockingly low" graduation rates when calculated with the method used by MSU researchers. The counting method, called cohort, is required under No Child Left Behind.

"What you're seeing in Detroit is the same type of thing you're seeing in Chicago, (Los Angeles), Houston and all big cities," Jennings said. "If the general finding is that the graduation rate in inner city schools isn't very high, they're correct -- and it's something to be legitimately concerned about. It's a warning sign that maybe the situation is worse than we thought, and maybe we should do something about it."

Leslee Fritz, spokeswoman for the state Budget Office, Center for Educational Performance Initiatives, which collects and maintains all education-related data in the state, said the cohort method is more accurate than the method previously used in Michigan because it accounts for students who may have left the state's public schools before their senior year.

Up until this year, the state calculated the rate by comparing the number of seniors in the fall to the number that graduate the following June.

"We agree that the four-year-cohort figure will be a more accurate measure because it will give you a better sense of how many drop out throughout the four years, rather than just at the end of it," Fritz said.

"This will be the first year we look at the number who enter as freshmen, and the number who graduate four years later," Fritz said. "Certainly, we've said that the expectation is that when you take that wider four-year view a number of districts will show a lower rate, and that the statewide graduation will go down as a result."

Gov. Jennifer Granholm has proposed increasing the dropout age to 18 and creating smaller high schools to boost graduation rates.

"Governor Granholm recognizes that we must provide a quality education for every child and provide them with the tools they need to be successful in the 21st century," Liz Boyd, Granholm's press secretary, said in a statement.

"She has called on education leaders and lawmakers from both parties to join her in solving the dropout problem."

State Department of Education spokeswoman Jan Ellis said Michigan this year began assigning identity codes to students, which will eventually be used to track them as they move through the educational system and on into college. But coordinating such a system with colleges will take time, she said.

Still, MSU's Shakrani believes the data from his study is the most accurate to date for quantifying the scope of the dropout problem in Detroit and statewide.

Shakrani's study found that students are most likely to graduate once they start their senior year. Students have the highest likelihood of dropping out between ninth and 10th grade.

"The implication is that we need to be able to predict which students have a potential to drop out and try to do something about it early," Shakrani said.

"When we see students aren't interested in school, the reason most likely is because the instruction is above their heads, so we need to improve their education at the middle school level.

"We need to make sure that the educational system is aware of the potential dropouts and to see what we can do to prevent them from dropping out."

You can reach Karen Bouffard at (734) 462-2206 or kbouffard@detnews.com.

[Jahness]

Greetings Mamazen!

You are definitely correct. This is a very hot topic for debate lately. The state of Georgia has done similar studies as well, and the results are very similar. Less and less students are graduating from high school. The drop out rates are very high and everyone keeps debating this topic nationwide to no end and refuses to do anything about it. I will look for one of the articles in reference to Georgia's educational system and post it as well.

Much thanks for providing the article.

Peace & Blessings!