Nancy Avelar

SED 322: Annotations

March 10, 2016
Annotations, Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling

This paper arises out of frustration with the results of school reforms carried out over the
past few decades. These efforts have failed. They need to be abandoned.

I like how the paper begins by being assertive in their beliefs that some reforms need to be
abandoned because they are just not working. I have similar feelings about a couple reforms,
especially the four-hour block of English for ELLs, but I feel as though law makers typically do
not listen to the public or even rely on facts when making decisions.

Americas dirty little secret is that a large majority of poor kids attending schools that
serve the poor are not going to have successful lives.

I used to be a bit more optimistic, but the more I learn about institutions, the more I learn that
they are treated as businesses, with those at the top knowing it is not a good system but continue
to do it for the money. If we know the education system is not working, and nothing changes, it
becomes a cycle, which does not let society move forward in the positive direction.

In the current policy environment, we often end up alienating the youth and families we
most want to help, while simultaneously burdening teachers with demands for success
that are beyond their capabilities.

Being a teacher is great, but sometimes when I learn about the laws behind it, it seems like a
difficult job with little room to create positive change. I know the first few years are going to be
tough, but I hope that I am not asked to implement strategies that are known to fail for students
and that emphasize on standardized testing is not great. If not, I think my teaching spark might
die off within a couple years.

On the other hand, out-of-school variables account for about 60% of the variance that
can be accounted for in student achievement.

What the quote is saying, is that students performance in school is affected largely by what is
going on outside of school, which makes sense. For those students in the lower income
communities, they carry burdens middle and high-class students do not. They have jobs,
responsibilities, and sometimes come from broken families. The only way to fix this is to help
narrow the economic gap in the US.

The staff and cultures of those schools, as well as the funding for those schools, appears
adequate, overall, to give America all the academic talent it can use.

Schools in middle or high-class neighborhoods receive a lot more funding from the community
itself, vs low income schools receive very little funding. A lot of the difference is donations from
parents and friends of parents. And this comes back around to the gap in economic status
between the American society. The paper makes it clear that in order to improve we must fix
inequality in income.

Nancy Avelar
SED 322: Annotations
March 10, 2016