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AbiolaFasehunFirstPaper 4 - 14 Jun 2012 - Main.RohanGrey
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Unearthing Myths about Urban Education, Unveiling The Power of the Family

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 Where shall we go from here- chaos or community? I choose community, I choose to disrupt the myth.


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Abiola,

Thank you for this personal and insightful piece. I am curious as to your thoughts regarding the role of community in not only child development, but in parenting itself. As i discuss with colleagues and friends about children and ideas for improving the social bonds that form the basis of communities, I regularly come across a mentality that parenting is a "natural right," and that the best thing that society can do is provide basic support and step back to allow parents to "fulfill their role" as the guides of their children's lives. For me, this idea that every person (or couple) is naturally born with the all skills required to parent is as equally flawed as the idea that children can be lifted out of their conditions by education alone. But how can we expect parents to reach out an ask for help when they need it if society is simultaneously telling them that good parents should be able to do it without any help? When state child services only become involved in cases of abuse and neglect, what incentive does any parent have to reach out for help to any public system? The fear of being labelled "negligent" or losing one's child after reporting an problem at home is hardly unjustified when ACS and/or DHS devote their services almost exclusively to responding to allegations of poor parenting, rather than developing an ongoing dialogue with parents of all demographics and competencies.

 You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

AbiolaFasehunFirstPaper 3 - 14 Jun 2012 - Main.AbiolaFasehun
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
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Unearthing Myths about Urban Education, Unveiling The Power of the Family

 
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Social Magic: Societal Myths about Educating Children Living in Poverty

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-- By AbiolaFasehun - 13 June 2012
 
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-- By AbiolaFasehun - 16 Feb 2012
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Introduction

There is a myth surrounding education that allows the social injustice of inequality to perpetuate, fester, and inhibit social progress. The myth being that through self-reliance and determination all children can grow up to be successful in this nation. There is no shortage of opinions as to how to remedy urban education. These supposed solutions distract from the myth that looms over this nation, and are often inapplicable a community's unique structure. I believe that to improve education, we must start at the home- a concept that can be applied to all communities regardless of race, wealth, or status.
 
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Modern social magic

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The Myth of American Success

The power of a myth is that it lays dormant within individuals, groups, and societies. A myth addresses societies unconscious fears, while helping individuals to ignore what is going on in the world around them. When Forbes Online ran an article about how to educate poor black children, the authors notions illustrated a pervasive problem in American education- the fallacy that if people put forth enough effort they too can grow up to be Horatio Algers. The article provided an interesting perspective in which to view technology as a source of empowerment, but fell prey to the idea that receiving a quality education is simple and accessible to all Americans. If a person of privilege can succeed, then why can't a person who is unprivileged or marginalized?
 
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On December 12, 2011, Forbes magazine published an online opinion editorial by Gene Marks titled, If I Were a Poor Black Kid. The article was written in response to a speech President Obama made about inequality and working to expand America’s middle class. Marks turned Obama's platform into an introspective piece on how poor black children can rise up from their unfortunate lives. Marks declared, "I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed... Even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia." In Marks view, the key to breaking socio-economic barriers is for the poor black children of America to try their hardest in school and use technology to their advantage, "If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently."

Marks' article begins with well-meaning intentions, but ends with misguided advice that could be termed social magic. In Courts on Trial, Jerome Franks describes the concept of magic as a control mechanism that man uses when he is "terrified by uncertainty, or baffled, or trapped". When faced with a concept or problem not easily explainable, as a society, we cling to magic. Instead of approaching the problem by utilizing economics or statistics, magic allows mankind to draw inaccurate conclusions and create defective rules to remedy problems.

The title of Marks' article alone serves as an indication of the primitive lens from which the author views poverty. Of the over 13 million children living in poverty in America, 1 in 3 of these children are African American while 1 in 4 are Latino. Though minorities may be more readily affected by poverty, America's economic downturn has shown that poverty can no longer simply be categorized by race. When Marks penned what he believed was an accurate portrayal of what it takes to lift black children out of poverty, he failed to acknowledge the external factors that affect access to quality education and technology in America, thus making his formula one of social magic.

When the desire to learn isn't enough

Marks' first premise is that for poor black kids to succeed they must simply make education their number one priority. Marks urges that this can be done by the students aspiring to become the best readers they can possibly be. What appears to be sound advice for any child reveals itself to be grounded in misconceptions about what the author believes the reality is for students living in poverty.

According to the American Physcological Association, African American students that grow up in poor communities face burdens such as being deprived of valuable resources, being exposed to less rigorous curriculum, and having teachers who expect less of them academically than they expect of similarly situated Caucasian students. Children living in poverty, regardless of their race, often face cognitive and non-cognitive developmental gaps that persist into adulthood if not addressed early. Marks comments, "If I was a poor black kid I'd use the free technology available to help me study. I'd become [an] expert at Google Scholar. I'd visit study sites like Spark Notes to help me understand books." Although technology can be a valuable portal of information for students, there are external factors that affect consistent access to technology.

Marks remedy for poor black students, fails because he does not understand or does not seek to understand the factors that limit his proposition. Marks is correct in surmising that now it is easier than before to access computers whether at home, school, or a library, but the fact that a computer is within close proximity does not make it easier for a child to be able to interact with the technology in a meaningful manner. Inherent in poverty are factors which may limit the depth of interaction that children can gain from technology. Such factors include a child's role and responsibilities at home. Marks aggrandizes the access that students have to computers at home and in public institutions.

Technology as a tool, but not the solution

Marks does raise a valid proposal: that technology can be used as an invaluable tool to expose students to resources that can help them succeed. Perhaps the truth in Marks' article is that once a student in America can obtain access to technology outside discriminatory factors that can impede on the amount of knowledge one can consume are limited. It would be a stretch to call that access or the path to that access equal. In a nation in which we are just to the poor and kind to the rich, Marks does make an attempt to acknowledge societies preference for the rich when he briefly mentions that not everything about success is under the control of poor black kids, "It takes a little luck. And a little help from others."

In Courts on Trial, Franks discusses Bernard Shaw's differentiation between false and true ideals. False ideals are existing realities with their masks on. While true ideals are "the future possibilities which the masks depict." Only by tearing off the mask and the thing that is masked under, can future possibilities be revealed. As Shaw's theory on false and true ideals can be applied to the American legal system, so too can it be applied to prejudices about the American education system.

Through his own form of magic, Marks fails to give a just analysis of the social and economic impediments that society must first deal with before poor black students across the nation can relish in the freedom of open information. Before dispensing advice to poor black kids, it would be a just exercise if Marks were to take off his own mask.

I don't understand why you want to spend 1,000 words arguing with someone who from your point of view has little to say. And I don't understand why you do so with so little actual effect.

The position taken in this eminently unimportant editorial is that education is a key to escaping poverty, and that if the writer were a poor child, he—being evidently a pretty good learner—would devote himself to studying his way out of poverty. Surely this is not only good advice for the writer, but also good advice, given by hundreds of millions of parents around the world, to hundreds of millions of poor children. Evidence accruing over generations, at both the individual and societal level, tends to confirm its value. People lift themselves out of poverty by getting good educations, and efforts to universalize primary, then secondary, and now post-secondary education have shown their value for societies as a whole from the eighteenth century onward. Moreover, given the general level of helplessness to affect most of their other circumstances, one of the few things children can do for themselves to improve their prospects in life is to succeed at educating themselves for skilled work. So the essay is trite.

Equally, of course, it means absolutely nothing to people who aren't able to go to school, or who once there turn out to be cognitively impaired, too hungry, too beaten, too frightened or too withdrawn to learn. One can say that in a sentence, as I just did. Though you go on a good deal about "factors which may limit the depth of interaction that children can gain from technology," in similarly abstruse language, you don't say anything concrete, provide a fact, offer a reference, or in any other way actually engage with the proposition you are advancing with odd implicitness.

Nor do you engage with the underlying social problem pointed at, however superficially, by the essay: in other societies around the world, children poorer and more culturally deprived than our country's poor work harder at studying, learn more, are better prepared for skilled work, and are beginning to compete very successfully for skilled knowledge-handling jobs in the globalized economy. What President Obama called "the Bangalore challenge" is very real, as practical acquaintance with Bangalore slum dwellers taught me, and would probably teach you too. Nor is poverty or white supremacy alone to blame: privileged American children too are surprisingly less effective learners than they should be, given all the "technology" of learning now available to them.

For the columnist, given his narrow individualistic conception, this is irrelevant, but not for you. If what he has failed to mention is that poverty sets obstacles in the way of learning, it is for you, given your supposedly wider perspective, to acknowledge first that even more intense poverty than can be found in the US does not extinguish thirst to learn in other societies' poor, and that the failure of US Americans to benefit from the intellectual attainments of the their culture is not restricted to the poor.

It seems to me that the best route to the improvement of this draft is to abandon the shallow object of your contention. If you have something you want to say about education policy, say it. Write a sentence or two that conveys the essence of your idea, then expand it to show some more of its bones and muscles, and consider some of the possible objections. Leave the callow to bury their own dead, and the clichés to take care of themselves.

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The failure of the urban education myth is that it masks a social failure, a form of hereditary determinism that lays dormant in the minds of the educated and elite- urban education has failed because minorities have failed. Through this myth we can choose to remain ignorant of the world we live in by not acknowledging that issues of social injustice, politics, and policy have furthered, if not endorsed the failure of urban communities, the failure of being black.
 
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Newark as a Case Study

I have a deep rooted connection to Newark. When I was a child my mother owned a soul food restaurant in Newark, where I often spent days and nights hiding under tables and observing my mother's patrons. The city served as an interesting contrast to the town where I grew up. About twenty minutes away from Newark, my family occupied a one story home on a tree lined street. Each tidy aluminum sided homes confined, like a space on a checkerboard. In my hometown I was the only African American among my peers, until high school when that number increased to five. Five out of three hundred and fifty students. The black students attended the black schools in communities like Newark, East Orange, and Irvington. At an early age I learned a great lesson- no two communities are treated equally.

After graduating from college, I chose to return to Newark to teach and try to remain engaged in the community that once provided a refuge. I accepted my position dreaming up my own notions of what problems impeded progress in urban education: lack of funding and little opportunity. As an Abbott district, Newark Public Schools spent around $20,000 on students when I was a teacher. There was no want of money from the teachers, but mismanagement of funds prevailed in Newark's education bureaucracy. Was I surprised to realize that what was happening in the homes of my students stood at the root of many problems facing urban education? Perhaps not. But I took my time in opening my eyes as if awakening from a deep sleep.

It Takes a Village

At the age of ten, my students were dealing with problems that most adults in America will never face. Don't you know? Henry's father was shot dead in front of him when he was seven. Didn't you hear? Amanda's mother made her sleep on the front porch last night. Though you would never find this information in a file, a new teacher would learn from pressing previous instructors as to why the child refused to engage in class, why the child could only read and write at a kindergarten level, or why the child was always sleeping in class. These are the problems that face urban education. They are problems that start at home, then bleed into the fibers of a community. They are problems that are rooted historically, taking their time to become an evolutionary product of our nations tragic past. Now these problems have become a part of the war stories told from stakeholders in urban education. So what is the solution?

The idea that it takes a village is nothing new, but more than one village, I would argue that it takes a collective of villages, working together to protect the best interests of children. A village of educators, a village of advocates, but most importantly, a village of family. By allowing parents to be disengaged in the process, a great disservice is done to a child. Although a child may spend the day at school, at the end of the day and at the end of the academic year that child will go home. Our society has become sick with the concept that teachers can and should be expected to do it all. Parents need to regain their position of power in the home by providing a stable environment from which a child can build their foundation.

But urban families in America are in need of assistance. According to statistics from Newark Kids Count, child poverty in Newark continues to rise. The number of families on food assistance has increased to 33% and nearly half of Newark children grow up in families that do not make enough income to meet their basic needs. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the systems at play which have created a perfect storm to trap individuals into a defeatist position. The prison system, education system, even zoning laws and community planning have contributed to the disruption that urban communities face. Children are force fed defeat from the moment they are born. Until we acknowledge the flaws that exist at the most basic levels of society, no meaningful change can ever come.

Where shall we go from here- chaos or community? I choose community, I choose to disrupt the myth.

 
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.

AbiolaFasehunFirstPaper 2 - 11 Apr 2012 - Main.IanSullivan
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META TOPICPARENT name="FirstPaper"

It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

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 Through his own form of magic, Marks fails to give a just analysis of the social and economic impediments that society must first deal with before poor black students across the nation can relish in the freedom of open information. Before dispensing advice to poor black kids, it would be a just exercise if Marks were to take off his own mask.
Added:
>
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I don't understand why you want to spend 1,000 words arguing with someone who from your point of view has little to say. And I don't understand why you do so with so little actual effect.

The position taken in this eminently unimportant editorial is that education is a key to escaping poverty, and that if the writer were a poor child, he—being evidently a pretty good learner—would devote himself to studying his way out of poverty. Surely this is not only good advice for the writer, but also good advice, given by hundreds of millions of parents around the world, to hundreds of millions of poor children. Evidence accruing over generations, at both the individual and societal level, tends to confirm its value. People lift themselves out of poverty by getting good educations, and efforts to universalize primary, then secondary, and now post-secondary education have shown their value for societies as a whole from the eighteenth century onward. Moreover, given the general level of helplessness to affect most of their other circumstances, one of the few things children can do for themselves to improve their prospects in life is to succeed at educating themselves for skilled work. So the essay is trite.

Equally, of course, it means absolutely nothing to people who aren't able to go to school, or who once there turn out to be cognitively impaired, too hungry, too beaten, too frightened or too withdrawn to learn. One can say that in a sentence, as I just did. Though you go on a good deal about "factors which may limit the depth of interaction that children can gain from technology," in similarly abstruse language, you don't say anything concrete, provide a fact, offer a reference, or in any other way actually engage with the proposition you are advancing with odd implicitness.

Nor do you engage with the underlying social problem pointed at, however superficially, by the essay: in other societies around the world, children poorer and more culturally deprived than our country's poor work harder at studying, learn more, are better prepared for skilled work, and are beginning to compete very successfully for skilled knowledge-handling jobs in the globalized economy. What President Obama called "the Bangalore challenge" is very real, as practical acquaintance with Bangalore slum dwellers taught me, and would probably teach you too. Nor is poverty or white supremacy alone to blame: privileged American children too are surprisingly less effective learners than they should be, given all the "technology" of learning now available to them.

For the columnist, given his narrow individualistic conception, this is irrelevant, but not for you. If what he has failed to mention is that poverty sets obstacles in the way of learning, it is for you, given your supposedly wider perspective, to acknowledge first that even more intense poverty than can be found in the US does not extinguish thirst to learn in other societies' poor, and that the failure of US Americans to benefit from the intellectual attainments of the their culture is not restricted to the poor.

It seems to me that the best route to the improvement of this draft is to abandon the shallow object of your contention. If you have something you want to say about education policy, say it. Write a sentence or two that conveys the essence of your idea, then expand it to show some more of its bones and muscles, and consider some of the possible objections. Leave the callow to bury their own dead, and the clichés to take care of themselves.

 
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

AbiolaFasehunFirstPaper 1 - 16 Feb 2012 - Main.AbiolaFasehun
Line: 1 to 1
Added:
>
>
META TOPICPARENT name="FirstPaper"
It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

Social Magic: Societal Myths about Educating Children Living in Poverty

-- By AbiolaFasehun - 16 Feb 2012

Modern social magic

On December 12, 2011, Forbes magazine published an online opinion editorial by Gene Marks titled, If I Were a Poor Black Kid. The article was written in response to a speech President Obama made about inequality and working to expand America’s middle class. Marks turned Obama's platform into an introspective piece on how poor black children can rise up from their unfortunate lives. Marks declared, "I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed... Even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia." In Marks view, the key to breaking socio-economic barriers is for the poor black children of America to try their hardest in school and use technology to their advantage, "If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently."

Marks' article begins with well-meaning intentions, but ends with misguided advice that could be termed social magic. In Courts on Trial, Jerome Franks describes the concept of magic as a control mechanism that man uses when he is "terrified by uncertainty, or baffled, or trapped". When faced with a concept or problem not easily explainable, as a society, we cling to magic. Instead of approaching the problem by utilizing economics or statistics, magic allows mankind to draw inaccurate conclusions and create defective rules to remedy problems.

The title of Marks' article alone serves as an indication of the primitive lens from which the author views poverty. Of the over 13 million children living in poverty in America, 1 in 3 of these children are African American while 1 in 4 are Latino. Though minorities may be more readily affected by poverty, America's economic downturn has shown that poverty can no longer simply be categorized by race. When Marks penned what he believed was an accurate portrayal of what it takes to lift black children out of poverty, he failed to acknowledge the external factors that affect access to quality education and technology in America, thus making his formula one of social magic.

When the desire to learn isn't enough

Marks' first premise is that for poor black kids to succeed they must simply make education their number one priority. Marks urges that this can be done by the students aspiring to become the best readers they can possibly be. What appears to be sound advice for any child reveals itself to be grounded in misconceptions about what the author believes the reality is for students living in poverty.

According to the American Physcological Association, African American students that grow up in poor communities face burdens such as being deprived of valuable resources, being exposed to less rigorous curriculum, and having teachers who expect less of them academically than they expect of similarly situated Caucasian students. Children living in poverty, regardless of their race, often face cognitive and non-cognitive developmental gaps that persist into adulthood if not addressed early. Marks comments, "If I was a poor black kid I'd use the free technology available to help me study. I'd become [an] expert at Google Scholar. I'd visit study sites like Spark Notes to help me understand books." Although technology can be a valuable portal of information for students, there are external factors that affect consistent access to technology.

Marks remedy for poor black students, fails because he does not understand or does not seek to understand the factors that limit his proposition. Marks is correct in surmising that now it is easier than before to access computers whether at home, school, or a library, but the fact that a computer is within close proximity does not make it easier for a child to be able to interact with the technology in a meaningful manner. Inherent in poverty are factors which may limit the depth of interaction that children can gain from technology. Such factors include a child's role and responsibilities at home. Marks aggrandizes the access that students have to computers at home and in public institutions.

Technology as a tool, but not the solution

Marks does raise a valid proposal: that technology can be used as an invaluable tool to expose students to resources that can help them succeed. Perhaps the truth in Marks' article is that once a student in America can obtain access to technology outside discriminatory factors that can impede on the amount of knowledge one can consume are limited. It would be a stretch to call that access or the path to that access equal. In a nation in which we are just to the poor and kind to the rich, Marks does make an attempt to acknowledge societies preference for the rich when he briefly mentions that not everything about success is under the control of poor black kids, "It takes a little luck. And a little help from others."

In Courts on Trial, Franks discusses Bernard Shaw's differentiation between false and true ideals. False ideals are existing realities with their masks on. While true ideals are "the future possibilities which the masks depict." Only by tearing off the mask and the thing that is masked under, can future possibilities be revealed. As Shaw's theory on false and true ideals can be applied to the American legal system, so too can it be applied to prejudices about the American education system.

Through his own form of magic, Marks fails to give a just analysis of the social and economic impediments that society must first deal with before poor black students across the nation can relish in the freedom of open information. Before dispensing advice to poor black kids, it would be a just exercise if Marks were to take off his own mask.


You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.


Revision 4r4 - 14 Jun 2012 - 02:38:52 - RohanGrey
Revision 3r3 - 14 Jun 2012 - 00:35:05 - AbiolaFasehun
Revision 2r2 - 11 Apr 2012 - 20:22:08 - IanSullivan
Revision 1r1 - 16 Feb 2012 - 06:26:57 - AbiolaFasehun
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