Outraged Dad Wonders If a Public Speaking Class Is Only for Rich Kids

[eridani]

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/09/15/outraged-dad-wonders-public-speaking-class-only-for-rich-kids

Back in 2006 media mogul Oprah Winfrey conducted a provocative experiment for an episode of her eponymous talk show: She swapped kids from Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, Illinois, a well-heeled Chicago suburb, with kids from Harper High School in Englewood, an impoverished, violence-filled neighborhood on the city’s South Side, just 35 miles away.

It wasn’t only the Olympic-size pool at Neuqua Valley that shocked and angered the kids from Harper. They were stunned by the academic offerings—including more than two dozen AP classes, compared with the two offered at Harper.
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Nearly a decade later, Frankie Adao, a dad in Newark, New Jersey, who is active in progressive education reform efforts there, is wondering why his son is only being taught ELA/SS—a combination of English language arts and social studies—while his peers in other parts of the state are being offered a more plentiful selection of advanced-sounding courses: Google Hacks, Civics, Media/Public Speaking, Sports Statistics, Creative Writing, and a whole stable of other art, language, and music electives. That’s just at one school.

“A bit of jealousy came over me,” Adao wrote on his blog late last week about his reaction to seeing the schedules being offered at other schools. “I wanted for my son what their kids had! Fair and equal opportunity to a great education.”

[elehhhhna]

1. I saw an article last week that said

That if all students are screened for ap versus only kids whose parents put them forward for testing, which is how it's done now, many more children actually qualify for ap studies and many of those otherwise untested kids are minorities and other underserved children. Duh!!!

But the way Rahm us wrecking CPS don't expect much. He's all about prioritizing everything.

[Igel]

12. That dealt with GT testing.

In many states GT high-schoolers are channeled into AP courses, but it's neither required nor restricted to them.

I'm not aware of any testing required for AP courses. Counselors do the screening, based on prior coursework and grades.


The main problem with the NBER report was it highlighted inequalities, but not so much with causation. Or the fact that the levels of GT kids in some groups is pretty much impossible. Yet that's the standard. (The problem is that many parents push and for political reasons--community relations, school AYP/report cards, etc.--the numbers of GT kids are inflated.)

[merrily]

2. The most liberal SCOTUS in US history considered a related issue and essentially said to

Last edited Wed Sep 16, 2015, 07:01 AM - Edit history (2)

children of poor parents, "Hard cheese, cutie pies. The Equal Protection clause doesn't cover everything."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School_District_v._Rodriguez

The rallying cry of 1773, early in the road to the American Revolution? "No tax on tea."

The rallying cry of 1790, early in the road to the copycat French Revolution? "Liberté, égalité, fraternité"

On our money? "In God We Trust"

On some French money? "Liberté, égalité, fraternité"


Moral: Choose the words for your currency and revolutionary war cries carefully.

NOTICE
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR,
Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.

Mark Twain

[ShrimpPoboy]

4. That case

essentially says that it's not a violation of equal protection if schools end up being funded differently due to differences in property tax incomes between school districts. That's a specious argument to me but even assuming it's correct, nothing is stopping states from abolishing that system and funding all schools equally. They're just choosing not to. As much as I understand the logic behind communities funding their own schools, the outcomes are simply unjust. Kids deserve an equal education and if we need to scrap the current system to get there so be it.

[merrily]

8. Reply 2 says essentially those same things.

[ShrimpPoboy]

10. I was just elaborating

[oberliner]

3. Civics is an "advanced-sounding" course?

Maybe if they changed the name of ELA/SS to Cultural Literacy or something it would sound more advanced.

[MattSh]

5. OK, what the hell is an AP class?

Yeah I've been out of the states for a while, but not that long. Or maybe it has been that long.

[Cosmocat]

7. Advanced Placement Courses

helps for admission to college and also can be used for credit for college courses (saving money and cutting on the number of college courses a student has to take).

[MattSh]

9. Thanks!

Should have thought of something obvious, but it still escaped me...

[Phil1934]

6. ap

advanced placement

[reformist2]

11. Forget "separate but equal" - today's ruling class shamelessly flaunts school inequality!

[Igel]

13. There are two separate but equal issues involved.

The first is funding. States are required to provide a free and appropriate public education.

That doesn't mean an education that's equal across the entire state. Just up to what's required. Over time, that minimum level's increased and increased and increased. Parents find ways around requirements to equalize funding.

The second isn't availability, it's participation and preparedness. A high school in my area was built and fully equipped with AP labs for science. Another older school had AP labs and a good set of AP courses.

The new school barely ever offered any AP classes. Students either didn't sign up, or the wash-out rate was so high that they stopped signing up. AP courses have standards set outside of the district.

The existing school saw its surrounding population change. It went from solidly middle-class to working class. The AP classrooms were used for storage, the AP storerooms converted to storage for other things. $10s of thousands of dollars of equipment was stacked, fell over, restacked, and then used to keep somebody's seedlings for a level biology class at window height. The seedlings leaked. The equipment was trashed. Same with thousands of dollars' worth of slides and preserved specimens. Somebody needed the slides they were mounted on, so expensive specimens were scraped off to save spending $20 on cheap plain glass slides. (Actually, it turned out nobody bothered to order them--they had the money, but not the foresight.) It wasn't like the AP teachers weren't still there. One was my student-teacher mentor. Was bumped from teaching a full day day of AP and pre-AP biology down to level science because there weren't enough students signed up for either class.