Literacy with an Attitude by Finn (hyperlinks)

This reading reminds me of the reading Land of Limitation, how through education in America we are being limit to reach higher level of education and becoming successful in our society. Finn explains in details the inequality between the urban schools’ and rich schools’ curriculum. He describes how in urban school the work students do are easy going, not as challenging and not as helpful to get students equipped for higher educations like college and striving for success.

In this YouTube clip Dr. George White talks about transforming urban schools using a system approach and a few ways education can be improved. In his presentation he states “the kids that are struggling the most we have to challenge the most instead of giving them the easy reading.” Finn and White are in the same page about how a more challenging curriculum would be more effective in improving inner city kids’ education. The high school I went to has a lower class education system how Finn would say. The assignments given by teachers are really easy in the way that they don’t require any kind of thinking which teachers look for a specific answer. Teachers don’t really demand a lot from the students, expectations are low; knowing obvious details about readings, no thinking outside the box, no personal thoughts or connections. “we can teach kids in elementary schools higher order math” White states that teachers can teach higher level math but I believe there’s still other factors that have to add to that. For example in high school I took Calculus  (college level class), it was a whole year around class and with all that time in hands we didn’t even covered half of what my professor in college covered when I took it.

American Episodes 562 and 563 connect to this reading in the way that integration works because it gives the low class kids access to rich-curriculum and the codes of power that Delpit describes