“stem” A question or statement on a multiple-choice test that poses a choice for the test taker. See also distracter; foils; multiple-choice item.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“social maladjustment: A vague term for a child’s chronic misconduct in the absence of emotional disturbance. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act specifically prohibits the classification of children as handicapped because of social maladjustment, although social maladjustment may occur together with legally defined handicaps.
In the past, it was a common practice for schools to place children into special education classes based on their misconduct rather than in the presence of a handicap. Many alleged that public school special education classes became ‘dumping grounds’ for the children whom no one wanted to teach, such as juvenile delinquents and those who defied authority.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“But we cannot fully choose when our minds will be riveted. We think about that impending project not only when we sit down to work on it, but also when we are at home trying to help our child with her homework. The same automatic capture that helps us focus becomes a burden in the rest of life. Because we are preoccupied by scarcity, because our minds constantly return to it, we have less mind to give to the rest of life. This is more than a metaphor. We can directly measure mental capacity or, as we call it, bandwidth. We can measure fluid intelligence, a key resource that affects how we process information and make decisions. We can measure executive control, a key resource that affects how impulsively we behave. And we find the scarcity reduces all these components of bandwidth—it makes us less insightful, less forward-thinking, less controlled. And the effects are large. Being poor, for example, reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not the that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces one’s bandwidth.”
Excerpted from: Mullainathan, Sendhil and Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. New York: Picador, 2013.
“In a 1930 symposium on ‘The New Education, Ten Years After,’ in The New Republic, Boyd H. Bode of Ohio State University remarked querulously that ‘To the casual observer, American education is a confusing and not altogether edifying spectacle. It is productive of endless fads and panaceas; it is pretentiously scientific and at the same time pathetically conventional; it is scornful of the past, yet painfully inarticulate when it speaks of the future.'”
Ravitch, Diane. Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. New York: Touchstone, 2000.
“In a study done in London, epileptic children were given an IQ test. Their teachers, not knowing the result of the test, were then asked to give their assessment of the children’s intelligence by stating whether the child was ‘average’, ‘above average’, ‘well above average’, etcetera, from their knowledge of each child. It is important to mention at this state that epileptic children suffer a lot of prejudice directed against them by the general society, similar to that Black children face—but obviously not as great. Teachers also tend to think of them as being less intelligent than ordinary children—again similar to what the Black child faces.
In 28 cases, the teachers seriously underestimated the child’s true ability. That means that a quarter of the children were wrongly assessed! In one case, a thirteen-year-old girl with an IQ of 120 (which is university level!) had failed her 11+ examination and was in the ‘D’ stream of a secondary modern school. Her teacher considered that she was of ‘below average’ intelligence! (Average intelligence= 100.) Another child with family problems and very low income got an IQ score of 132 (which is exceedingly high). Her teachers, however, all rated her as ‘low-stream’ material.”
Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.
“During these years, too, the schools for the classic education for Negroes have not done any better. They have proceeded on the basis that every ambitious person needs a liberal education when as a matter of fact this does not necessarily follow. The Negro trained in the advanced phases of literature, philosophy, and politics has been unable to develop far in using his knowledge because of having to function in the lower spheres of the social order. Advanced knowledge of science, mathematics and languages, moreover, has not been much more useful except for mental discipline because of the dearth of opportunity to apply such knowledge who were largely common laborers in towns or peons on plantations. The extent to which such higher education has been successful in leading the Negro to think, which above all is the chief purpose of education, has merely made of him more of a malcontent when he can sense the drift of things and appreciate the possibility of success in visioning conditions as they really are.
It is very clear, therefore, that we do not have the life of the Negro today a large number of persons who have been benefited by either of the systems about which we have quarreled so long. The number of Negro mechanics and artisans have comparatively declined during the last two generations. The Negroes do not proportionately represent as many skilled laborers as they did before the Civil War. If the practical education which the Negroes received helped to improve the situation so that it is today no worse than what it is, certainly it did not solve the problems as was expected of it.
On the other hand, in spite of much classical education of the Negroes we do not find in the race a large supply of thinkers and philosophers. One excuse is that scholarship among Negroes has been vitiated by the necessity for all of them to combat segregation and fight to retain standing ground in the struggle of the races. Comparatively few American Negroes have produced creditable literature, and still fewer have made any large contribution to philosophy or science. They have not risen to the heights of black men father removed from the influences of slavery and segregation. For this reason we do not find among American Negroes a Pushkin, a Gomez, a Geoffrey, a Captein, or Dumas. Even men like Roland Hayes and Henry O. Tanner have risen to the higher levels by getting out of this country to relieve themselves of our stifling traditions and to recover from their education.”
Excerpted/Adapted from: Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-education of the Negro. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2018.
“When the Teacher Does Not Expect Much From the Child: Most teachers absorb the brainwashing that everybody else in the society has absorbed—that Black people are inferior, are less intelligent, etcetera, than white people. Therefore the Black child is expected to do less well in school. The IQ tests which are given to the Black child, with all their cultural bias, give him a low score only too often. The teachers judge the likely ability of the child on the basis of this IQ test. The teacher has, in the form of the IQ test results, what she considers to be ‘objective’ confirmation of what everybody else in the society is thinking and sometimes saying: that the Black children on average have lower IQ than the white children, and must consequently be expected to do less well in class. Alderman Doulton of the Education Committee in the Borough of Haringey has expressed this view, and it is probably fair to say that the banding of children in Haringey for supposedly achieving equal groups of ability in all the schools was really clever plot to disperse the Black children in the borough throughout the school system. The notorious Professor Jensen, the Enoch Powell of the academic world, has added credence to the myth of Black inferiority by openly declaring that Black people are inherently less intelligent than whites, and therefore Black children should be taught separately.”
Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.
“And even in the certitude of science or mathematics it has been unfortunate that the approach to the Negro has been borrowed from a ‘foreign’ method. For example, the teaching of arithmetic in the fifth grade in a backward county in Mississippi should mean one thing in the Negro school and a decidedly different thing in the White school. The Negro children, as a rule, come from the homes of tenants and peons who have to migrate annually from plantation to plantation, looking for light which they have never seen. The children from the homes of white planters and merchants live permanently in the midst of calculations, family budgets, and the like, which enable them sometimes to learn more by contact than the Negro can acquire in school. Instead of teaching such Negro children less arithmetic, they should be taught much more of it than the white children, for the latter attended a graded school consolidated by free transportation when the Negroes go to one-room rented hovels to be taught without equipment and by incompetent teachers educated scarcely beyond the eighth grade.
In schools of theology, Negroes are taught the interpretation of the Bible worked out by those who have justified segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro sometimes almost to the point of starvation. Deriving their sense of right from this teaching, graduates of such schools can have no message to grip the people whom they have been ill trained to serve. Most of such mis-educated ministers, therefore, preach to benches while illiterate Negro preachers do the best they can in supplying the spiritual needs of the masses.
In the schools of business administration Negroes are trained exclusively in the psychology and economics of Wall Street and are, therefore, made to despise the opportunities to run ice wagons, push banana carts, and sell peanuts among their own people. Foreigners, who have not studied economics but have studied Negroes, take up this business and grow rich.
In school of journalism Negroes are being taught how to edit such metropolitan dailies as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times, which would hardly hire a Negro as a janitor; and when these graduates come to the Negro weeklies for employment they are not prepared to function in such establishments, which, to be successful, must be built upon accurate knowledge of the psychology and philosophy of the Negro.
When a Negro has finished his education in our schools, then he has been equipped to begin the life of an Americanized or Europeanized white man, but before he steps from the threshold of his alma mater he is told by his teachers that he must go back to his own people from whom he has been estranged by a vision of ideals which in his disillusionment he will realize that he cannot attain. He goes forth to play his part in life, but he must be both social and biosocial at the same time. While he is a part of the body politic, he is in addition to this a member of a particular race to which he must restrict himself in all matters social. While serving his country he must serve within a special group. While being a good American, he must above all things be a ‘good Negro’; and to perform this definite function he must learn to stay in a ‘Negro’s place.’”
Excerpted/Adapted from: Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-education of the Negro. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2018.
“The Emotional Disturbance Bias: Many of the problem children, I would contend, are suffering a temporary emotional disturbance due to severe culture and family shock, resulting from their sudden removal from the West Indies to a half-forgotten family, and an unknown and generally hostile environment. They often react by being withdrawn and uncommunicative, or, alternatively, by acting out aggressively, both of which are well-known human reactions to upset, bewilderment, and dislocation. This behaviour is often misunderstood by these supposedly trained people, as being a permanent disturbance. Despite their training, in my experience, many teachers feel threatened by disturbed children and tend to be biased against them. This accounts for the extremely large number of West Indian children who are submitted for assessment by the teachers not on grounds of intellectual capacity, but because they are ‘a bloody nuisance’. And dozens of teachers have admitted this to me.
This temporary disturbance of children due to the emotional shocks they have suffered may well take on a permanent form, however, when the nature of their problem and their consequent needs are misunderstood, and instead they face an educational environment which is humiliating and rejecting. While suffering emotional turmoil they are placed in unfamiliar testing situations, to do unfamiliar and culturally biased tests, with white examiners whose speech is different, whom they have been brought up to identify as the ‘master calss’, and before whom they expect to fail. They then experience the test, only to have their fears confirmed, when they are removed from normal schools—in their mind, ‘rejected’—and placed in the neighbourhood ‘nut’ school. And it must be remembered…that 20 percent (that is, one-fifth) of all the immigrant pupils in six of their secondary ESN schools had been admitted to the Special School without being given a trial in ordinary school first.”
Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.
I just whipped up this worksheet template for Jeopardy lessons for a colleague of mine. Before I go off to proctor another stupid standardized test, I thought I would post it here.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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