Building walls internally and externally

"You have got to be kidding me!" was my first thought as I read the title of the New York Times article: U.S. Erects Baghdad Wall to Keep Sects Apart.

Is that our new solution to everything?? If we can't get along or if we don't want to deal with them, build a wall. Talking to and listening to people is too difficult, I suppose. It takes too much time, effort, understanding, and (God forbid!) possibly some compromise about what we have always thought is the "right" way to do things!!

Walls allow us to block people from our view...We don't have to see them. We don't have to deal with them.

Do walls work??

Creating walls and distance seems, to me, to have started in the 60s. People moved out of the city fleeing people who looked different than them without any desire to even try to get to know the people they were running from. People moved out and built large houses with alley garages and privacy fences. But the walls, gates, and backdoor entrances did not keep them from having problems...drugs, domestic violence, and homocide still exists in their homes, too.

Despite the failure of creating barriers from our fears, we still continue to create walls...only now they are bigger, more obvious, and very deliberate...We can't figure out how to deal with immigration, so we create a wall....We don't know how to handle the Shiite and Sunnis, so we create a wall. The way we're going, I wouldn't doubt if the next wall built separates inner city communities from suburbia. (I'm only being slightly sarcastic here. The rate we're going, it honestly wouldn't surprise me. It scares me to think we would do that, but wouldn't surprise me.)

What's worse than a physical wall, however, is that those physical walls help create and allow us to justify our emotional walls. We have created these walls in our own country, and now we are projecting our fears and our unwillingness to listen and compromise onto the global society. We avoid people we don't know and/or don't understand. We say that "they won't listen to reason," but the reality is we haven't taken the time to listen to them. We say that "they're taking over our country," but we haven't sat down with them to listen to their delimmas and asked them to help us create a solution. We say that "our inner cities are violent and uneducated," yet we want to be selfish and keep all of the resources for our own children and our own communities.

We ignore and refuse to believe the intelligence and capacity of people who are different than us.

Walls ostracize people. They create barriers between people. They create anger and resentment because people do not know each other.

For those of us who recognize this, we have to actively work against this...in our own hearts, in our communication with our politicians, by our actions, and by our choices. Walls do not eliminate our problems; they exacerbate them.

Lowering expectations?? Pt. 2

One of the proposals for the South Dallas area is to make one or two of the high schools into a Police Academy and a Nursing Academy. The word "Academy" makes this sound like a very prestigious opportunity...just like the word "magnet school."

Magnet programs were set up in the late '60's and early 70's because of White Flight. As White people scattered to the suburbs to avoid integration, schools attempted forming specialized programs that would make White parents want to transport their kids back into the city to attend the higher quality magnet schools. This was never accomplished. Magnet schools, along with all urban public schools, are more segregated now than in the 70's (Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation, 2005).

Despite the eloquent ring and the good intentions of "magnets" and "academies," I have always been bothered by the actual concept of these types of schools. Two things bother me. 1) Kids are asked to decide on a career before they have any experience with life. 2) Academy and magnet schools are not necessarily higher level schools, but often glorified trade schools.

Point 1:
In order to get into an "academy" or a "magnet," students receive applications in the 8th grade. At that point, they fill out their application and choose what specialty school they would like to attend. There are several options--performing arts, humanities and communication, law, travel and tourism, etc. At 13 years old they are asked to choose their career! Whatever they choose is what they will focus on for the next four years. Those courses will be their electives. They do not have the options to choose a variety of electives to figure out if they have other interests.

Point 2:
Jay Mathews addresses the negative aspects of magnet schools in his Washington Post article, "In College Admissions, Magnets Are Negative" (November 12, 2001, A1). He points out that magnet programs often result in lower GPA's, less challenging courses, and less of a focus on academics.

So why the focus on magnet and academy schools? The reasoning I have heard for the Police and Nursing Academies are so that more kids in South Dallas will graduate from high school. To me, however, these glorified trade schools are only lowering the expectations for our South Dallas (and other urban area) students. Because we expect that they won't achieve more, we are lowering the expectations and providing more trade schools in hopes that they will have at least minimal skills. That, to me, is unacceptable.

How about instead of lowering the expecations and providing lower-academic trade schools, we provide schools that have interesting curriculum and quality teachers that challenge kids? How about we get them the help that they need to get them up to grade level in their reading, writing, and math skills? How about instead of lowering our expectations for the kids, we raise the expectations for our schools?

I'm an educator. I've seen education done in ways that could engage any child. Unfortunately, interesting education is not the norm in our lower-income schools. Instead, there is a huge focus on testing and passing those tests. There are baseline tests, practice tests, and actual tests year-round. Because the schools are so busy focusing on tests, they don't have time to focus on learning. And then we wonder why kids disengage.

The kids in South Dallas are just as intelligent as kids in the suburbs. Unfortunately for them, they are at the mercy of adults who make the decisions--adults who feel like low-level, low-income students need lower-level skill opportunities to help them get through. I disagree. I think we need to raise the level of expectations for the students, for the teachers, and for the administrators. We need to offer the students high quality, interesting learning opportunities.

Let's not put extra money into forming more academies and magnets. How about, instead, we invest our extra money in providing kids with opportunities, giving them a variety of experiences, and preparing them academically so that if they change their mind they have the option and the skills to do something different?