education is primarily a barrier to entry: true or false

I've interviewed about 60-75 of my students this year, most have stable two-parent homes. i think it has everything to do with the parents unease with the work their kids do beyond a certain level (a lot of them have not completed beyond 8th or 9th grade education themselves).

the kids on my debate team/academic teams def see value in college, tho. its a chance for them to get out of their neighborhoods and have opportunities their parents never did. the economy has always been shitty when so many around you are doing p self-destructive things. but i don't think you'll be seeing them complaining about waiting tables in NYT quiddites pieces tho.

like, I think that an upper-middle class kid from a family w/ smart people could probably drop out of high school at the end of his junior year, never go to college, and still be about as capable when it comes to writing / math / doing basic analytical things as a lot of people I know who did go to college.

any reason we wouldn't just automatically assume the same were true of any other socioeconomic group?

it certainly seems true to me considering teachers. i have known and worked with teachers from places like Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, etc even stanford and also a bunch of people from state schools and community colleges also working in the same environment and I wouldn't say we were exactly the same in our communication styles I saw no correlation is effectiveness and "educational prestige"

any reason we wouldn't just automatically assume the same were true of any other socioeconomic group?

i'm inclined to think (nb this is me trying to dig out why ""we"" might think that, not my personal opinion) that this is coming back to the question of class--"people in positions of authority" are predisposed by our culture to expect "better" from people with a prestigious background and "less" from someone whose environment was less prestigious. that's how that kind of thinking replicates.

i guess one reason might be

1) not as likely to be passing state tests

2) state tests determine or predict competence post-college

i was awesome at all of these things at high school and completely useless at them in a white-collar workplace

in high school i was a total delinquent with a "bad attitude" and disrespect toward authority figures. now i'm attentive, helpful, diligent, and i usually respect my superiors' wishes. the high-school me would never recognize the adult me. i have no idea when this change came about. i'm such a suck-up now!

any reason we wouldn't just automatically assume the same were true of any other socioeconomic group?

well people in other socioeconomic groups are statistically less likely to have been in the 'right' social/political/educational environments. it wouldn't be true for upper middle-class kids across the board either, but I was just using them as a group that's likely to have had 'the best education' an american can get up to that point.

what you're saying is true iatee but i wonder what it signifies when we say the "right" social / political / educational environment.

for example, ime hispanic working-class students have more responsibility at a younger age than their anglo middle-class peers. i don't have any research to back this up but i am pretty sure it is out there because it is something i have heard over and over again in california workshops on educational equity

so i wonder whether this would not also be an example of a "right" social environment - on the face of it, you would think giving them responsibility would give them a better affective make-up to do well in school.

and yet, the opposite seems to be true. hispanic students fail classes at something like 2x the average rate of anglo students, are disciplined more often, drop out more often, etc

so when we talk about the "right" environment, i wonder what we are talking about, and specifically how it affects cognition, skill development, knowledge base, etc

and how does that stuff impact how you do in a white-collar environment

re: communication skills

there are tens of thousands of tech workers in california who get along in complex technical fields w/ a limited grasp of english (think people from asia and europe on H1B visas)

there are also hundreds of thousands of non-tech-workers who speak worse english than my hispanic students and yet manage to run successful businesses

so what gives? why are those "poor communication skills" so much more debilitating in an academic setting? and why do we assume those academic difficulties are going to translate to difficulty at work?

I think a lot of the way we teach K-12 in the USA is aimed at training people to fill out & manage paperwork efficiently, & to a lesser degree to manage their time efficiently. The latter remains important but the former is now less so.

I also think that we're ill-served by the predominance of women in primary & secondary ed in the USA, since learning styles & attention levels & interests vary amongst genders & I think having more men involved in those levels of education would help recalibrate our attitudes to those. I also tend to think we should have a way smaller classes so that there could be more one-on-one teaching, less rote work, but that's the usual pro-ed line, throw money more at the problem. I think it's the right thing to do, though.

granted, those people have specialized knowledge that allows them to communicate with their peers.

for example, i may not be able to talk philosophy with teaching colleagues from israel (this is a specific example in my life, we do some professional collaboration w/ people in israel, egypt, mexico) but i can talk *teaching* philosophy very easily

and similarly i may have trouble talking about traveling abroad w/ my indian drycleaner or the banh mi shop owner or the mexican guys at the taco shop, but we have no trouble talking about my drycleaning or the banh mi or the taco i want (this is a specific thing i have done w/ all these people)

so i wonder whether or not teenagers (hispanic, black, asian, white, green purple i don't care) might not have things in common that would give them enough common ground to communicate and develop thinking skills along more equitable lines

it reminds of that old education debate between john dewey and that other guy

the other guy said that childhood education should be a preparation for adult life

john dewey said "education is a social process; education is growth; education is not a preparation for life but is life itself"

if we treat high school science class as preparation for being a professional engineer, then kids like me who have engineer parents will have a natural leg up (thinking about age eight, when i was trying to siphon water out of a fishtank using mouth and tube, my dad explained to me the idea of "hydraulic lock")

on the other hand, if we treat high school science class as an opportunity to learn science in a way where the kids have a more level playing field - making it not about learning specialized vocabulary and memorizing the names of the parts of the cell, but instead making it about "what do you notice about the world around you" and "how can we think about systems of things and categorizing things and making conclusions that are repeatable and confirmable" then maybe this is something that would help

i don't know, the problem is that the second type of science class i describe is in the "pie in the sky" stage, and if you back off of rote / procedural learning for a second in this current political climate you immediately open yourself up to accusations of not preparing our kids to compete w/ china or something like that

sorry, not responding to euler, just trying to explain my thoughts there

I don't have any data, either, but that jibes w my experience p well re: Latino working class kids. a lot of my students are reponsible for child or elder care or have jobs bc they have to. but I think it correlates some w their lack of success in school bc it's like, I have a type of job now that most of the ppl around me have so it's not a big deal if I cheese off school bc now I'm at least getting paid and contributing to my household and not wasting my time struggling at school

xp

yeah that rings true for me ... you can definitely see a difference between students w/ working-class parents who have made up their minds to go to college and those who haven't

xp re: communication skills

would u say those on h1b visas have a well-developed native language which facilitates their abilities to grasp the complexities of engineering or programming or what have you? thats my greater concern is that my students will leave school without ANY formal academic language proficiency.

but more to your point, i think if we want our education sys to produce citizens who can adapt to many employment environments, i think having the ability to communicate well is p paramount. im not sure comparing native US citizens with conversational fluency in two languages (or perhaps just one) to visa workers who have specialized academic training is nec apt. but i don't know enough abt "the typical h1b visa worker" to make an informed call on that.

that's a good point about the "well-developed native language"

on the other hand i wonder whether the complexities of engineering or programming are much more cognitively demanding than the complexities of landscaping, auto repair, construction, and many other "trades"

it is an old argument whether the professions we think of as "demanding" are really that "demanding", but my favorite take on it is an old one, howard beckers "a school is a lousy place to learn anything in", which contrasts the cognitive demands of high school w/ the cognitive demands of learning to be on a construction site.

www.bedspce.org.uk/mod2/BECKER2.pdf

I think what you're looking for as far as language is the idea of restricted and elaborated codes:

Not only that, but because it draws on a store of shared meanings and background knowledge, a restricted code carries a social message of inclusion, of implicitly acknowledging that the person addressed is "one of us". It takes one form within a family or a friendship group, and another with the use of occupational jargon within a work group. Its essential feature is that it works within, and is tuned to, a restricted community. Everyone uses restricted code communication some of the time. It would be a very peculiar and cold family which did not have its own language.

... in restricted code usage there is an expectation that others will indeed know what you are getting at, from a few key words ... Elaborated code spells everything out: not because it is better, but because it is necessary so that everyone can understand it. It has to elaborate because the circumstances do not allow speakers to condense. ("Condensed" might have been a better label for the restricted code.)

Restricted/condensed code is therefore great for shared, established and static meanings (and values): but if you want to break out to say something new, particularly something which questions the received wisdom, you are going to have to use an elaborated code. Bernstein's research argued that working-class students had access to their restricted code(s) - but middle-class students had access to both restricted and elaborated codes, because the middle classes were more geographically, socially and culturally mobile. I do not know of any recent research which attempts to check whether this is still true.

Because schools and colleges are:

* concerned with the introduction of new knowledge which goes beyond existing shared meanings

* relatively anonymous institutions which may not share many taken-for-granted meanings in their formal structures (although quite a lot in their informal structures within the staff and student groups)

- they need to use elaborated code. The bottom line is that if you can't handle elaborated code, you are not going to succeed in the educational system.

http://www.doceo.co.uk/background/language_codes.htm

YES. its that ability to code-switch that i am wanting my students to have, to be able to swing between foul-mouthed casualness and formal academic language.

^^^ this is a model for the use of literacy for me as well

AH GAH that sounds like the most fucked up classist idea though

"middle class students are capable of making new meanings and questioning received wisdom but working class students are not"

WTF

yeah i don't like the code-switching lingo because it seems like a really limited account of the language students speak with each other/at home.

i'm thinking about the ability to appropriate Boss Class language without buying it as a superior form of communication

which isn't the same as that elaborated code guff now i read it back

yeah i see your point on that being a classist idea.

so alternatively we could just say that different classes have different dialects, without needing to say anything about "expressive power"? i mean it's just as hard for me to slip into the dialect of a different class/ethnic group.

different classes have different discourses - those fluent in the dominant discourse like to believe it's dominant because it has advantages over the others

in my experience, too, whenever teachers brought up "code-switching" it was to hastily push the students' experiences, culture, identity to the side so as not to have to deal with it. i think i've said elsewhere on ilx that a lot of what the teachers did in the classroom was explicitly tell the kids they needed to take on "middle-class culture" in order to be successful and then model it for them, in pretty patronizing ways.

right

a chemistry teacher in his 70s once said to me "our job is tough because chemistry is the realm of the intellectually elite"

o_O

* concerned with the introduction of new knowledge which goes beyond existing shared meanings

* relatively anonymous institutions which may not share many taken-for-granted meanings in their formal structures (although quite a lot in their informal structures within the staff and student groups)

like one thing i've noticed is that hispanic, white and asian students seem equally adept at learning new knowledge and new meanings ...

when it has to do w/ pokemon, halo, warcraft, OFWGKTA, clothing brands, etc etc

i'd argue that a lot of the standards of written English are coded tho, and that the main reason to become fluent in formal written language is for pragmatic advantage

i have a horrible story at secondhand where another student teacher, who was teaching math at an urban charter school, had a cooperating teacher tell her class when some kids were talking through her lesson that "this is why black people aren't successful." she was white btw.

haha yeah "LOUD BLACK STUDENTS" is *the* racist bugaboo of the 90s, we studied the case of "LOUD BLACK STUDENTS" in one of our classes on equity

it basically just studied how LOUDNESS "codes" to teachers, when white kids were loud the teachers used words like "excited" and "squirrely" to describe them and when black kids were loud the teachers used words like "distracted" and "disruptive"

give us an example then

i mean maybe pokemon is less complicated than the periodic table you learn in HS but i doubt it, from what i can tell pokemon is intensely complicated

er sorry that was two posts that got merged, the "give us an example" is for noodle v

Take, say, sports -- that's another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it -- you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance. [audience laughs] That keeps them from worrying about -- [applause] keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it's striking to see the intelligence that's used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in -- they have the most exotic information [more laughter] and understanding about all kind of arcane issues.

you can guess who that is

he is otm though

Shakey is more erudite than usual there

(i just want to say, chomsky is OFFtm about the whole conspiracy aspect of this, as usual)

right, sports is another example

how can people who understand baseball statistics not be able to understand "real" statistics

how come people can do math in their head w/ dollars and cents but not w/ numbers or variables

because they're culturally conditioned to believe that they can't

ppl have no understanding of context

also many ppl can't do math in their head w/ dollars and cents, or maybe it's just the ppl I go out to dinner with

haha yeah and they are probably ivy leaguers too, right?

the one that trips me out is when the annenberg foundation went to harvard and interviewed a bunch of science majors leaving their graduation and just asked them "where does the mass of a plant come from as it grows" and 95% of them didn't know the answer

haha yeah and they are probably ivy leaguers too, right?

haha enough of them are for it to be embarrassing

like, dude you have an MD, why can't you divide by 5

on the other hand, if we treat high school science class as an opportunity to learn science in a way where the kids have a more level playing field - making it not about learning specialized vocabulary and memorizing the names of the parts of the cell, but instead making it about "what do you notice about the world around you" and "how can we think about systems of things and categorizing things and making conclusions that are repeatable and confirmable" then maybe this is something that would help

i don't know, the problem is that the second type of science class i describe is in the "pie in the sky" stage, and if you back off of rote / procedural learning for a second in this current political climate you immediately open yourself up to accusations of not preparing our kids to compete w/ china or something like that

― the late great, Friday, March 16, 2012 8:52 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, yeah. ideally, a good science curriculum does both: teaches about the scientific method in an accessible manner, and also drills important basic information into kids' heads so that they don't have to take high-school level classes in college. and i do think that high expectations and a strongly competitive emphasis on college prep are good things in a general sense. our schools should work to cultivate excellence wherever possible, as well as provide a basic level of educational service.

I'm not sure the code-switching thing has to be taken as classist/racist. business-speak is exactly as 'restricted' as the language inner-city kids use with each other. and people have access to 'elaborated' code and certain types of analytic thinking due to their life experience, not due to some innate ability. isn't the opposite be far more problematic?

wouldn't the opposite be*

re: discussion of "elaborated" vs. "restricted" codes

some social groups (of whatever "class") probably do promote the idea that "code-switching" is important, and that elaborated codes are important. others probably do not. to the extent that certain contexts - such as school, for instance - require a comfortable familiarity with elaborated codes, those who have such familiarity and/or can code-switch easily, may well be more successful in general. i do not see this as in any way a "classist" idea, even if it seems to be true that certain supposedly "lower class" cultural groups tend to stress the importance of restricted codes.

^ some questionable comma placement there

i also don't buy into the idea of a "restricted" vs "elaborated" code

chemists and auto mechanics both use complicated shorthand for what they do

yeah iatee i think the position you are taking is more reasonable than what i posted though. the quote above really made it sound like poor kids only have access to a language which makes it difficult for them to formulate new ideas as such.