Wednesday, February 10, 2010

In the Sleeter and Grant article "Business as Usual," all of the statistics were intense but the ones that struck me the most were the wages between women and men. As it states in the article, "the earnings of full-time working women are only about 80% the earnings of full-time working men." Part of the reason this occurs is because men and women self select into different types of jobs; it just so happens that the jobs women choose to do are less well-paid due to the fact that women are doing them. Even within traditionally masculinized work, women are paid less than their male counterparts with the same jobs. This is a tremendous difference, especially when women who are single parents have children to care for. No wonder more single-parent women are in poverty compared to single-parent men. It also explains in the article that "women are given custody of children in about 84% of divorce cases and often must attempt to support the family on a low-wage budget." How are these women supposed to properly care for their children by giving them a good education and supplies for school with a low salary? Women often choose to identify with lower paying jobs, such as an educator, but why are these jobs considered less important than other well paying jobs.
In the "How Students are Grouped" section of the article, Sleeter and Grant explains ability grouping and tracking in schools. Tracking is a conflicting topic for me because on the one hand, as stated in the article, it "perpetuates race and class inequities" and "lower-track students were often turned off to school and felt academically incompetent." All students should feel comfortable and appreciated in schools and by giving them different labels separates them from their classmates in negative ways. Students in the upper-track could make rude comments to other students in the lower-track and vice versa. Also, expressed in class on Monday, students who are said to have"behavioral problems" and instead just have energy could be wrongly put into special education classes. On the other hand, students with learning disabilities who really need extra help benefit from being taken aside and taught more thoroughly. When I was in elementary school, I had a hard time with math so my teacher put me into an extra help math program. I feel that the smaller classroom size and the one on one help from a different teacher helped me out a lot. I do understand how students could feel academically incompetent because that is how I felt the first time I got taken out of class for this program. I do not have a suggestion of a different way to handle these situations other than tracking but a different system has to be set up to make students want to be in school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge1p3lL1Mfg

This clip from Desperate Housewives illustrates tracking in schools. Throughout the clip, Susan and Gabby are trying to decide which classification (the leopards, chipmunks, or giraffes) has the gifted students and which has the slower students.

(Sources: Making Choices for Multicultural Education: Five Approaches to Race, Class, and Gender 5th Edition)

3 comments:

  1. I agree that there has to be a change in the way we track students. I also am not sure how to acomplish it but I feel that pitting students against each other is detrimental to all students.

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  2. I think that this clip is an amazing illustration of the preoccupation American "mainstream" culture has with stratification in terms of education.

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  3. I think what you're calling for here is a healthy balance and I don't think anyone would disagree with that. The issue we face is that young Black boys are being tracked and classified far more than any other children in the system. Therein lies the problem.

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