Talking Points: A Particularly Cheap White Whine:WISE

For my quotes this week I took three of Wise's quotes about how the nation's educational system provides unfair advantages to people.

"The average white student in the U.S. attends school with half as many poor kids as the average black or Latino student, which in turn has a direct effect on performance, since attending a low-poverty school generally means having more resources available for direct instruction. Indeed, schools with high concentrations of students of color are 11-15 times more likely than mostly white schools to have high concentrations of student poverty."  I never really considered how this was taking a toll on students education... Schools with a high count of student poverty have some of the worst testing scores. Middle class students attend generally better school systems, get better grades,  get on the right track for a more society acceptable way of life.  Does this mean we should be mixing schools by district, income, and race?  Would that make things better or worse? I'm not completely sure.

"White students are twice as likely as their African American or Latino counterparts to be taught by the most highly qualified teachers and half as likely to have the least qualified instructors in class. This too directly benefits whites, as research suggests being taught by highly qualified teachers is one of the most important factors in school achievement".  I agree, being taught by highly qualified teachers is a very important factor in school achievement.  I think the school systems should be mixing the most highly qualified teachers, with new teachers and then from there they should work together whether it be in workshops on ways to improve or just generally planning curriculum together.  This way all students will have that same advantage (or at least SOME advantage of which they would benefit from).

"Whites are twice as likely to be placed in honors or advanced placement classes, relative to black students, and that even when academic performance would justify lower placement for whites and higher placement for blacks, it is the African American students who are disproportionately tracked low, and whites who are tracked higher ." This statistic probably correlates with the two prior points.  Students are placed in honors or AP classes more often because they are generally doing better in classes.  If more white than black students are being placed in these classes it could very well be because they are poverty stricken and have not benefited from some of their teachers.  They overall have not had the same opportunities as white children may of had.  They also may not do as well on standardized testing as well because they did not have the same childhood and bringing up as everyone else.  Such as in Meier's reading and examples in class... Some students are read to and children look at the pictures/read along, some are told stories and allowed their imagination to run wild.