Race, Poverty, and Equality

I just watched a video I have had queued up for quite some time now.  It was Uri Treisman’s talk on race, poverty, and equality at the NCTM conference this year.  I learned a lot in watching the video and found it very thought provoking. 

An nteresting topic of discussion was something called Campbell’s Law which states that “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social process it is intended to monitor.”  Treisman went on to talk about how focusing too much on high stakes testing has and will continue to lead to a corruption of the process and undermine the original intent.

One premise of the talk was that the accident of where you live should not shape your education.  It was startling to hear about the differences from state to state.  Some states in this country perform as well as the highest performing countries in the world (Texas) while others perform like third world countries (California).  In fact low income students in Texas perform as well as high income students in California.  Latino students in the Houston metropolitan area were 2.5 grade levels above the Lation students in the Fresno metropolitan area.  This seems to suggest that we don’t necessarily need to look at other countries as a model for our education system.  Perhaps we just need to look at states in our own country which are high performing. 

The other key premise of the talk was that poverty and race matter.  Even in a high performing state like Texas, poverty and race play a huge role.  The talk was filled with some fascinating charts and graphs, and if those are your thing, you will really enjoy it.  Treisman suggested we build “fault-tolerant” schools which don’t let poverty ruin a child’s chance at an education.  He used a beautiful analogy about the design of Boeing’s airplanes and how they gained market dominance by designing their planes to be able to withstand an unpredictable failure.  We too need to do the same with our schools.  Unfortunately Treisman didn’t get into the particulars of how to design such a school.  He left that exercise up the viewer, which is essentially the exercise we are performing in this class. J