How Disrespect Hurts Kids
Dear Pedro,
Picking up from your words Tuesday: The argument ought not to be about the influence of schools vs. society. I think we agree about this. Schools are part of the society that both creates and sustains poverty and racism. Although I think test scores are the last place in the world where we're likely to capture positive change in either school or society, that does not mean that the hours young people spend in school every day have no impact.
When I first began to teach—in the early 1960s—it was crystal clear to me based on two years of substitute teaching that the education the poor (and poor black children above all) received in Chicago was substantially different from the education that children in white middle-class families received. What struck me with perhaps equal intensity was the disrespectful ways teachers and parents were treated in such schools. I was, literally and naively, stunned.
In the few integrated schools I saw, it looked somewhere in between, like Shoesmith Elementary School, during the period in which my children attended it and I taught kindergarten there.
What became clearer were the ways a disrespectful setting hurts kids—leading us to miss some children's
Picking up from your words Tuesday: The argument ought not to be about the influence of schools vs. society. I think we agree about this. Schools are part of the society that both creates and sustains poverty and racism. Although I think test scores are the last place in the world where we're likely to capture positive change in either school or society, that does not mean that the hours young people spend in school every day have no impact.
When I first began to teach—in the early 1960s—it was crystal clear to me based on two years of substitute teaching that the education the poor (and poor black children above all) received in Chicago was substantially different from the education that children in white middle-class families received. What struck me with perhaps equal intensity was the disrespectful ways teachers and parents were treated in such schools. I was, literally and naively, stunned.
In the few integrated schools I saw, it looked somewhere in between, like Shoesmith Elementary School, during the period in which my children attended it and I taught kindergarten there.
What became clearer were the ways a disrespectful setting hurts kids—leading us to miss some children's
