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| Miguel Basáñez, one of many presenters at the conference, conducts a workshop with members. |
The “Closing the Achievement Gap” conference held in Sacramento brought together CTA members and nationally recognized authorities in such areas as public policy, psychology, education, and African American and Latino studies. The two-day event, sponsored by CTA’s Institute for Teaching, centered around discussions on improving student achievement based on what schools, parents and teachers are doing right.
“The answers to closing the achievement gap lie with our teachers who know what works and with our students and parents who know how important a good education is to their future,” said CTA Vice President Dean Vogel. “This conference provided the next step in reaching that goal.”
Speakers included Lawrence Harrison, director of the Cultural Change Institute at Tufts University’s Fletcher College; Ronald Ferguson, faculty co-chair and director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University; Miguel Basáñez, president of the Global Quality Research Corporation; and Reese Schonfeld, the first president of the Cable News Network (CNN), among others.
Participant Karla Davis, a member of the San Juan Teachers As- sociation, talked about a discussion group that she thought was engaging at the event. “I found Ronald Ferguson’s data on African American child-rearing practices and the relationship between social success and student achievement of particular interest. As a teacher working with our district’s Program Improvement (PI) schools, I’m always seeking new perspectives on student achievement issues.”
Ferguson — who is also a renowned economist, as well a lecturer in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard — is author of the book Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap. In it he explores the importance of lifestyles and informal social processes that play out between children and their parents and peers.
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| Participants are all ears during a presentation segment. |
Keynote speaker Jane Kim- Hall, author of the book Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers, reiterated Ferguson’s message when she talked about informal processes, and how her parents integrated her studies into everyday events in their home life. After seeing the movie Ghostbusters, for example, her father talked about the film at dinner and interjected into the discussion science (the elements the ghosts were made of) and the planets (they came from Jupiter).
Presenter Basáñez gave a presentation on “values, beliefs and cultural attitudes” that often factor into perpetuating the achievement gap.
Basáñez talked about his own children — who were born in Mexico but grew up in both Mexico and the U.S. They found that after spending some of their primary years at schools in the U.S., they had trouble readjusting to the Mexican schools. Over just a matter of a few years, the cultural divide had become too great.
So how will members put this information to practical use?
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| Presenter Ronald Ferguson (right) leads a workshop group as Daly Jordon-Koch (left) takes it all in. |
“This summer, with help from my local association and service center,” said Davis, “I plan on implementing and facilitating a parent- teacher-student coalition in our district for our PI schools for the purpose of starting dialogue around ways to increase educational opportunities for the stakeholders in these schools.”
Davis explained that the school she currently teaches at has a high rate of student achievement and a high level of parent and community involvement. “I plan on forming a coalition in a community of greater need within the school district to integrate many of the workshop’s principles so similar networking can begin.”
When Schonfeld — author of the book Me and Ted Against the World — was asked by a participant in the crowd about the possibility that media might increase access points of education for students of different cultures, Schonfeld replied that video games could be a great source of learning for kids.
“If I wanted to teach science to kids,” said Schonfeld, “I’d use science fiction video games and in the subtext teach as much as I could about science. If I was trying to teach the classics, I’d take every single one of the classics and turn them into games. There is as much violence in Ulysses and Jason and the Argonauts as most games that are out there now. Let kids play those games and learn about history and Western culture at the same time! That’s something I’d like you to encourage the Silicon Valley and Hollywood crowd to do.”
Schonfeld spoke about the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California and the major media school there. “If the people of the Annenberg educational division and the media division could get together, you might have a force that could produce games like the ones we’re talking about. And I think you could do that.”
Davis said that she took away quite a bit from the weekend event. “This conference was invaluable to me. The information shared needs to be expanded to a wider audience, as it provided an unprecedented opportunity for a global and local perspective on methods to work toward building a culture of success for not only students, but all citizens.”
Dave Earl Carpenter
For more information on Closing the Achievement Gap, visit www.teacherdrivenchange.org or e-mail questions to IFT@cta.org.
