podcast, brown v. board of ed, herbert

SUMMARY/ARGUMENT


Podcast:
Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative reporter at the New York times, is the speaker in this podcast. In this podcast, she speaks about her experience with segregation in the schools she was investigating in Durham, North Carolina. During her studies, she found that many “bad” school, which were usually lower class and minorities, very seldom caught ip to the “good schools”, usually upper class and white. However, something that she did find was that, the more schools intergrated white and black students together, the less there was such of a gap between the good and bad reputation of the schools. Back in 1971, black students’ test scores were 39 points lower than their white counterparts. However, fast forward nearly 20 years to 1988, and their scores were now only 19 points lower According to Hannah-Jones, this is because of the introduction of intergration. The takeaway meaning behind this podcast is the idea of intergration, segregation, and how the introduction of intergration better helped black students and helped them to catch up. The privileges became more balanced, in a way.

Herbert:
Something that is interesting to me is that Herbert opens up his article with an argument very similar to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s. He starts off by saying that very little success can occur if you pack all of the low income students into one school. Herbert argues that instead of being so obsessed with charter schools and firing more teachers for doing the “wrong” thing, that we should instead focus our attention on integrating more upper class and lower class children together, in the same school. Because, if we don’t do that, we will never see true improvement.; we will never see a difference. Something that is different from his argument to Nikole’s, though, is that he does not believe that race has as much to do with it as her. He argues, however, that class has more of an effect on whether or not these students thrive.

Brown V. Board:

Basically, in this article, Brown fought against the board of education in a court of law. he argued that segregation should be abolished, and as a jury reached their verdict, he was proven victorious in his efforts. This court case, in the 1950s, was what set the way for many black students to be intergrated into a white school. This is what set the way for these kids to have the same life as their privileged counterparts. This article is so interesting because it ties the other two articles together, and basically gives them ground to stand on. 

overall, the reoccurring them during this week’s material is how segregation/class/race affected student learning, and how it still does. the reoccurring theme that is argued, though, is that race should not influence how a child succeeds in life, but unfortunately, it does. But, a way to balance this unfortunate circumstance out is by equaling out the races in school. Perhaps by doing that, some children will end up being more successful.