Do All Students Receive the Same Chance?

I read a report titled A Question of Equality: Do All of My Students Receive the Same Chance? By Jonathan D. Haraty. This report is about a science teacher who teachers in a school where students often get into trouble as far as criminal problems. Recently, the school had to be changed from a high school plus minimal middle school to one building with separate sections. The teacher use to have to teach middle and high school but with the new reform, he only teachers high school with other new teachers now teaching middle school separate from high school. The teacher now has only fifteen students per class but most students have IEP’s and other learning disabilities. Another challenge this teacher has to face is the challenge of having several students out of class at a time due to court action and being “locked up”.
One student complains to him that her work is too easy and that her mother also agrees and they think that this will lead to her getting into trouble because she is not being challenged enough in school. The teacher started to look at his teaching more carefully. He was tending to gear his lessons to students who were at the remedial stage of learning. The teacher also had students that were learning English as their second language. This was also a problem because the school was trying a school-wide teaching method of using a lot of reading and writing assignments and activities in the classroom. Since this teacher had ESL Students, he had to slow down the pace for the rest of the class because of this. He noticed that many of his students that were completing their work and getting good grades were often looking out the window and distracting the other students during class. This was due to them being bored mentally. The teacher decided to do a survey with his classes. He figured by doing this, he could find out what the students felt was not challenging enough about the work. He then could interview them to find out what they need as individuals. The teacher told all of the students about the survey and explained to them what it was for, told them there was a consent form to sign for the survey and the interview, and explained that they did not have to do either if they did not want to. Also, the teacher explained that the survey and interview would in no way benefit or harm their grades.
The findings came out that during the one week period that the survey was given; only thirty-five percent of the students completed the survey. The teacher teaches grades nine through twelve and found out that the younger students were the ones who were most intrigued and interested to participate in the survey. Even more interesting, the students ended up saying that they wanted to keep up with the status quo that was already established meaning, they did not want anything in class to change. The students said the work was a good level for them and also none said it was too hard. Only two students said that sometimes in the past the work had been too easy. When asked how they would feel about getting more work to do, most students thought it would benefit them.
The discussion segment showed that the teacher was only able to interview two students. This was due to gang related problems. One student said that the reform helped her because before she felt she was not being pushed enough in her work, while now she feels the work is at a good level for her. Another student said that he doesn’t like extra work and that he shuts down when he has to do it. The teacher said that this student needs to pushed a little and that the work for him was not too hard. In the end, the teacher thinks that he has changed his teaching since the reform. Before the reform, he could easily differentiate lessons for students, but now, the reform makes that more difficult. How does one differentiate a reading lesson when the whole class is being read to out loud? Differentiation is something that the teacher would like to pursue more and plans to research more.
I thought from reading the title of this report that this report was going to be about students’ backgrounds and home life, and how it relates to how they do in school. I was surprised how I was completely wrong. However, I did feel that this was an interesting report. I can somewhat relate to it from the school in teach in. Although, I don’t have nearly as many problems and things to take into consideration with my students like this teacher had. I thought his findings were interesting. Many students did not participate due to gangs. Most of the students that did participate would not have an interview with the teacher.
In Maryland, we work in counties instead of small school districts. They have been talking about reforming schools especially in the middle schools. Reform can be good, but as we found out here, it can hurt the individual needs of our students, therefore forcing us to be more creative with developing work for these students.
Interesting article, what are your thoughts?