The Art of Critical Pedagogy
Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools
Series:
Jeffrey M.R. Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell
1 The Challenges and Opportunities of Urban Education
Extract
1
The Challenges and Opportunities of Urban Education
We begin this chapter by articulating some key ideological and structural dilemmas in urban education that result in a lack of funding, high dropout rates, excessive teacher attrition, and low standardized test scores. Rather than taking a defeatist tone, we address these dilemmas in order to situate critical pedagogy as a viable force for confronting them. We conclude the chapter with an outline of the remaining chapters in the book.
Let us begin by rethinking the position that urban schools are failing. Given the overwhelming body of evidence that reveals decades of funding and structural inequalities between schools in high- and low-income communities (Akom, 2003; Anyon, 1997; Darling-Hammond, 1998; Kozol, 1991, 2005; Noguera, 2003; Oakes, 1985), it is illogical to compare schools across these communities and then decry urban schools as failures. When one set of schools is given the resources necessary to succeed and another group of schools is not, we have predetermined winners and losers. In this scenario, failure is not actually the result of failing. This is the paradox facing urban school reformers. On the one hand, urban schools are producing academic failure at alarming rates; at the same time, they are doing this inside a systematic structural design that essentially predetermines their failure. This is where the urban school reform rhetoric has missed the mark. It has presumed that urban schools are broken. Urban schools are not broken; they are doing exactly...
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