BLOG 3: “What Counts as Educational Policy? Notes Towards a New Paradigm” by Jean Anyon

 “What Counts as Educational Policy? Notes Towards a New Paradigm” by Jean Anyon

Reflection:

Jean Anyon’s discussion of poverty and school systems in this week’s reading provoked a lot of thought for me. Growing up, I had friends from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds, ranging from a single-income household with a nonverbal autistic child to another friend whose father is a CEO. Additionally, I attended a private college through tuition remission due to my father’s employment. Because of these varied experiences, I found it somewhat difficult to gather all of my thoughts from the article into a single response. What I  did was start a conversation with my mother, who works for the Woonsocket School District in Rhode Island.

 

I have been surrounded by people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, myself included, but I realized I needed to develop a deeper understanding of how those differences impact education. Reflecting on last week’s reading, my initial thought was, “one step at a time.” How can we fix curriculum, school structure, testing, poverty, low funding, and all the other factors that make learning difficult for children today — all at once? The short answer is: we can’t.

After speaking with my mom, who shared that her district’s test scores are at an all-time low and that the pressure to raise them falls heavily on teachers, I began to see the issue differently. Especially since my mom is the most dedicated, hardworking teacher I know, it made me question how much responsibility schools can carry. For example, in some inner-city areas, buses only pick up students within certain walking distances. If a child misses the bus and their parents do not have access to a car, that child may have no way of getting to school. While this may seem like a specific example, it reflects a broader issue of how under-resourced communities are structured and funded.

All learning depends on effective teaching, but how can teachers teach successfully when students struggle to attend school consistently, lack proper nutrition, or fall behind socially and emotionally? The reading explains that students from cognitively stimulating, higher-income, and stable households tend to perform better academically. That makes sense, but it also raises the question: how do we address that disparity?

I am beginning to understand that educational inequality cannot be solved solely within the classroom, it begins with community. This means low wages, limited employment opportunities, and underfunding shape the students’ lives before they even go to school. A school can receive funding, but if a household is struggling financially, the child is already at a disadvantage.

Tying all of this together and using my mothers school district as an example would be an amazing discussion. How do the test scores being low (and needing to be raised) fall so heavily on the teachers when it is the state/federal providing such low funding and limited resources to the community (and school district)? What else would assist these communities? And how will funding the community affect the school system in that district? How long will it take?