Confections of apartheid: A stick-and-carrot pedagogy for the children of our inner-city poor

Phi Delta Kappan

Volumn 87, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 265-275

  Kozol, Jonathan ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 29144513684     PISSN: 00317217     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003172170508700404     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. Erica Frankenberg, Chungmei Lee, and Gary Orfield, "A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?," Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, January 2003; and Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, "Brown at 50: King's Dream or Plessy's Nightmare," Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, January 2004.
2. Correspondence with Gary Orfield, May 2005.
3. Jodi Wilgoren, "Repetition + Rap = Charter School Success," New York Times, 6 June 2001.
4. Billy Tashman, "Choral-like Reading Plan Makes a Comeback," New York Times, 6 August 1995.
5. Conversations with former P.S. 65 teacher Christina Young and other P.S. 65 teachers, 2001, 2002, and 2004.
6. Success for All (SFA) is a program generally used in an uninterrupted 90-minute "literacy bloc" at the beginning of the day. But the program's Skinnerian ethos, silent signals, and "faultless communication" are intended to govern the entire school day, and the three-word slogan tends to dominate the corridors and classrooms of the schools in which it's used.
7. Mr. Endicott (not his real name) entered public education under a program called the Chancellor's Fellows, which recruits highly motivated people without teacher preparation to work in New York City's low-performing schools while they take education courses in the evenings or during the summer break.
8. The severity with which the gesture is performed appears to depend upon the sensibilities of teachers or directives of a supervisor. Materials provided to me by SFA in 2005 illustrate the signal being given with elbow bent, but a South Bronx principal who had observed its use described it to me recently in these words: "Stiff arm. Hand up. Flat palm." SFA is no longer used in New York public schools.
9. A memorable exception to this pattern at the time I visited was a kindergarten program in the classroom of a teacher named Yolanda Smith, who somehow managed to create an island of real warmth and tenderness within a school in which these qualities were hard to find. Ms. Smith is still at P.S. 65 under a new administration that has brought dramatic changes to the school. The hand-held timers and the scripted lesson plans are gone.
10. The demographic data for this school come from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data, 2001-02.1 visited the school in the winter of that year.
11. Tracy Locklin, former chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, in a 2002 conversation with Jacob Ludes, executive director of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. My interview with Ludes took place in December 2004.
12. Susan B. Neuman, cited in Diana Jean Schemo, "Education Bill Urges New Emphasis on Phonics as Method for Teaching Reading," New York Times, 9 January 2002.
13. The teacher who handed me this document and the district in which the teacher works are unnamed at the teacher's request.
14. Abby Goodnough, "Judging a School by Its Poster: Bulletin Boards Are Scrutinized, and Fretted Over," New York Times, 18 June 2002.
15. These were the words of P.S. 65 teacher Christina Young. Another teacher, the only African American among the 15 young recruits at P.S. 65 the year I visited, told me he refused to falsify his students' writings for the hall displays. "You're a great teacher, but we need that bulletin board," the principal informed him. "I write wonderful letters for teachers. . . ."
16. This school is unnamed to protect the privacy of the teacher.
17. My conversations and written correspondence with Mr. Endicott are from 2001 and 2002.
18. Abby Goodnough, "Fearing a Class System in the Classroom: A Strict Curriculum, but Only for Failing Schools, Mostly in Poor Areas of New York," New York Times, 19 January 2003.
19. Ibid.