The links on this page all go to free web resources, from investigative journalism to TED talks, that explore the relationships among education, structural inequality, and being labeled “at risk.”
Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) is a free database that indexes a wide variety of research on education. See the Scholarship page for search tips.
Articles
Bernard, S. (2007, April 16). Mural Arts: Youth Programs Paint the Town. Edutopia.
Participation in MAP [Mural Arts Philadelphia], for many, is sustained. Some students stay in the program for years and progress from reluctant members of ARTscape to major assistants on current mural projects. “This is a second home for them,” says Ogilvie. “We’ve had students who have run away from home, but this is the place they keep coming to.”
Learn more about Mural Arts Philadelphia
Fresques, H. V., Hannah. (2017, February 21). “Alternative” Education: Using Charter Schools to Hide Dropouts and Game the System. ProPublica.
No Child Left Behind was supposed to improve educational outcomes for students long overlooked — including those who were black, Hispanic and low-income. Yet as the pressure ramped up, ProPublica’s analysis found, those students were precisely the ones overrepresented in alternative classrooms — where many found a second-tier education awaiting them.
Learn more: ProPublica’s investigation of American charter schools.
Hannah-Jones, N. (2014, December 19). School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson. ProPublica.
[Michael] Brown’s tragedy, then, is not limited to his individual potential cut brutally short. His schooling also reveals a more subtle, ongoing racial injustice: the vast disparity in resources and expectations for black children in America’s stubbornly segregated educational system.
Nikole Hannah-Jones also discussed the Normandy School District on This American Life in 2015.
Learn more in ProPublica’s series on racial segregation in 21st-century America
Hertz, M. B. (2010, March 18). Guest Blog: What’s the Best Way to Teach “At-Risk” Students? Edutopia.
Maybe we are wasting our time labeling students. If we teach students as the individuals that they are, then labels are unnecessary. This approach would also make irrelevant scripted intervention programs, remedial classes and rigid grouping and tracking of students that can often prevent them from success by the academic track and label that precedes them.
Mary Beth Hertz blogs about teaching in West Philadelphia at http://mbteach.com.
Standen, M. (2008, August 6). Telling Their Tales, At Last: Urban Youth Use Technology to Express Themselves. Edutopia
We had a girl who had to do a book report on a famous person, but her teachers at school couldn’t get her to write about anyone. She didn’t want to do it. But she came to DUSTY [Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth], and we showed her some things. She put together this nice dedication to Aaliyah, the singer who died in a plane accident, and she used all this digital composition and put her voice over it, and we helped her with the story and told her to put herself in there. It was great.
When her teacher saw it, he was totally surprised by what she had done. He had been trying to get her to do something like this, but on paper. He said that he didn’t know that she had it in her, and it made me think how important it is to have these kinds of centers, for kids to be something different outside of school, because you get labeled in school as a certain type of student. When you can get out of that and get a chance to be seen as something different, that’s important.
Learn more: Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth (Note: the link in the above article to the DUSTY website is out of date.)
Media
The public radio program This American Life often reports on education inequities in the United States. Some highlights are below. Explore their archive for more programs.
Episode 538: Is This Working? October 17, 2014
Focusing on what we do and don’t know about managing kids’ behavior, this episode illuminates racial disparities in how children are disciplined in school, from preschool on.
All those times she was suspended, she didn’t come back less angry, ready to obediently follow directions. It was the opposite. Tunette says, “I went into kindergarten knowing I was bad. I went into first grade knowing I was terrible. And it just went up from there.”
“The idea is that if you want a kid to move from one social class to another, that kid has to see what it looks like over there on the other side. Exposure is a tool for social change and economic mobility.
“Or it just sucks. You see how much you did not get, and it’s shocking and painful.”
Many TED talks feature educators who work with youth labeled “at risk.” Start with these, and explore other education talks and resources recommended by the speakers on the TED website.
Because why should our students have to go so far away from where they live? They deserve a quality school in their neighborhood, a school that they can be proud to say they attend, and a school that the community can be proud of as well, and they need teachers to fight for them every day and empower them to move beyond their circumstances. Because it’s time that kids like me stop being the exception, and we become the norm.
Right now, we’re asking kids who live in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, who have the least amount of family resources, who are attending the country’s worst schools, who are facing the toughest time in the labor market, who are living in neighborhoods where violence is an everyday problem, we’re asking these kids to walk the thinnest possible line — to basically never do anything wrong.
Why are we not providing support to young kids facing these challenges? Why are we offering only handcuffs, jail time and this fugitive existence? Can we imagine something better?
Learn more: Read Alice Goffman’s book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (2015). Picador.
If our children are not in our classrooms, how will they learn? And if they’re not learning, where would they end up?
It was evident when I would ask my 13-year-old, “Young man, where do you see yourself in five years?”
And his response: “I don’t know if I’m gonna live that long.”
Learn more: Read Nadia Lopez’s book, The Bridge to Brilliance (2016). Random House.
We know why kids don’t learn. It’s either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences… We know why. But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection. Relationships.
Will you join me in changing the way we label young people from “at-risk” to “at-promise?
Learn more: Read Victor Rios’s book, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (2011). NYU Press.
