Robbed - Washington Post | PACEsConnection

"And yet another student verbalized what has become a common refrain throughout my years of teaching. Her decision to stop reading Catcher had little to do with the story itself but was instead a product of her inability to sustain focus for more than a few sentences at a time (a common symptom of an overstressed short-term memory). Despite conveying to her some of the reading strategies that I’ve used to assuage my own ADHD, she countered that her home was too noisy for reading. She never made it through the first chapter.

"While these situations are obviously not restricted to low-income households, the triadic correlation among poverty, repeated environmental stress, and learning struggles is irrefutable. It is a reality reflected in reams of peer-reviewed empirical studies and in the words of expert practitioners like Dr. Vincent J. Felitti, the director of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study at Kaiser Permanente, who cautions, “What happens in childhood, like a child’s footprint in wet cement, leaves its mark forever.” It is also a reality that classroom teachers struggle to address every day.

"These students are the children left behind by No Child Left Behind and other failed social experiments that purport to elevate the kids of disadvantaged families. In actuality, such legislative sleights of hand saddle low-income and high-needs kids with the inferior learning experiences that are largely constituted around feeding the beast of for-profit testing and textbook companies, rather than in creating lifelong learners, innovators, and leaders...."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/02/robbed/

Robbed - Washington Post

Attachments

Add Comment

Comments (0)

Skip to main content

Attachments

Add Comment

Membership Required

Remove From Your Block List

Manage Follow Preferences

Block

Please wait...