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Elementary Ed in a University Town

Secondary,Primary,elementary discrimination

The article talks about the value of the special needs program that is being cut in Champaign-Urbana.

Article text (with comments):
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Elementary Ed in a University Town
By Oronte March 28, 2008 11:56 pm EDT

Champaign-Urbana is not a small town, though it’s often thought of as one. It’s actually two cities, of course, with separate governments. Urbana is the county seat and address of America’s 14th-largest campus; Champaign is home to the second-largest food manufacturing plant in the world, a 1.6-million square foot Kraft facility that makes enough processed American cheese slices in a year to “stretch from Champaign to the moon."

Population sums run as high as 210,000, but that’s certainly taking into account surrounding communities and probably the transient student population too. In any case, something has changed in our shared demography recently, or at least in corporate attitudes to our demographic worth: We only just got Starbucks, Potbelly Sandwich Works, Cold Stone Creamery, and other businesses well above Hardee’s/IHOP/Arby’s in the food chain.

Together we have the crime of a medium-sized city, though the relative data can be crunched many ways, and an apparent gap between rich and poor. On the busy road north to the big box stores and the better mall, kids from the lower-income neighborhood walk across five lanes of traffic nonchalantly, slowly, fatalistically, as if daring drivers to take anything else from them.

One of the most noticeable problems of (especially) Champaign’s size is its schools. Education being the cornerstone of citizenship and all, I’m sorry to admit that before parenthood I simply paid my taxes and assumed public school issues would work themselves out. But necessity puts the spur to apathy, and now that Starbuck is five and nearly done with Montessori kindergarten, I’ve started paying attention. As Mrs. Churm pointed out to me, the schools of Champaign are funded just by Champaign’s taxes, with the odd result that instead of being uniformly good or bad—the way of many individual Chicagoland suburbs, where she grew up—the Champaign school district looks like a microcosm of a much larger city’s, such as Chicago’s. I suppose I thought the university’s presence and resources would somehow moderate disparity the way a large body of water moderates temperatures onshore.

Many university employees own homes in a small area of Urbana known by the weirdly inverted nickname “the faculty ghetto.” When my wife and I mention to other parents that our house—bought before we had children—is on the fringe of that area, they sigh, Ohh, as if we have no worries. If nothing else, many parents with advanced degrees get deeply involved at the elementary school where Starbuck will go. But there is a kind of educated-elite flight in process. Professionals and businesspeople of all stripes have been buying big homes across town, in Champaign, where taxes are lower and plywood McHousing is still being thrown up on bare tracts among the corn despite the economy. (If the film Field of Dreams taught us nothing else, it’s that corn stands for Death.) Their tradeoff is schooling.

Everyone (but me) seems to know the names of the best primary school in town (private tuition is $1,000 more per year than at the university), the worst, and the reputations of the 16 between them. Unsurprisingly, African American and Hispanic neighborhoods have fared the worst, and a lawsuit against the Champaign school district resulted in a consent decree that aims “to improve the academic performance of the district's black students, and it mandates the district to eliminate unwarranted disparities between black and white students in participation in gifted classes, assignment to special education, discipline and attendance, among other things.” A Schools of Choice program now assigns kids to schools based on “parent choice, building capacity, racial balance, availability of special programs, presence of siblings in the school, and proximity preference.” This has led to further unease and violations of the decree.

An outreach program called the Chancellor’s Academy, hosted by UIUC’s College of Ed, was started in 2005 to offer professional development training to area educators to try to level the field. Last year 80 local teachers and 40 administrators attended the two-week program. “Funding,” the Illinois News Bureau reports, “comes from the Illinois campus, which pays for faculty time, books and supplies, and a $500 stipend for each participating teacher. The school districts provide staff to assist with planning, as well as release time for teachers to attend training activities during the school year.”

I don’t know how results will be measured, but one hopes that the 8th-best public university in the country, with a 1.5-billion dollar endowment, will be able to do something for its community, if only for the uni’s best interests (think faculty recruitment). A psychogeographical map of all this—needs, interests, funding, population, abilities, compassion, stories—would be fascinating, especially if it had an overlay of the university’s influence (for better and worse) on our little town.

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Comments on Elementary Ed in a University Town

* Posted by Orwell on March 31, 2008 at 9:55am EDT
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First, send Starbuck to Caprica to study with Apollo. Or should Starbuck study at a Starbucks?

Second, please be so good as to explain "unwarranted disparities" from the warranted type, or is this merely more wishful utopian thinking that every child is an identical commodity despite his or her nature and nuture?

* Orwell
* Posted by Oronte Churm on March 31, 2008 at 1:05pm EDT
*

How marvelous! My first troll, after 16 months of blogging. And with a Battlestar Galactica citation yet. Where you been, Orwell?

I don't have to explain "unwarranted disparities," since I didn't say it. That's what quotations marks mean. As far as "nurture" goes, isn't that the issue--who gets nurtured? And since much of this is based in race, are you sure you want to argue about "nature"?

* Posted by Orwell on April 1, 2008 at 9:30am EDT
*

I have been a regular reader for some time, but I'm the laconic type.

It is not that I'm ignorant of the Pequod, but sending young Starbuck to sea went out with the nineteenth century.

As for "unwarranted disparities" I did not attribute it to you, but was asking for your take on educationalist doublespeak. I'm of a mind that children have a nature - an individual nature - and that such gross taxonomies as black and white are better left to the David Dukes and Reverend Wrights.

Being laconic my ration of words is used up.

* Posted by Oronte on April 1, 2008 at 11:55am EDT
*

Fair enough, Orwell. Say, how'd you get your laconic gig? I could use me some of that.

Oronte

Blog U

28 March 2008

Ethnography of the Brown v Board Jubilee Commemoration

Schools, Ethnography of the University

The Brown v. Board of Education Jubilee Commemoration is a year-long, multi-faceted, and very ambitious project that bears the distinctive stamp of Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s interest in diversity in higher education. It is not an exaggeration to say that there is hardly a unit at UIUC that has not been touched by, or taken an active hand in the Brown Commemoration. The Ethnography of the University (EOTU) is pleased to take on the Ethnography of the Brown Commemoration (EBC) knowing that the commemoration—its particular shape and life on our campus—offers a window on the university’s diverse understanding of itself at this important historical juncture. Currently there are four paid undergraduate researchers attending Brown Commemoration events, interviewing participants, and writing up field notes that will be used next summer as undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty pull together a lengthy document that assesses the commemoration’s accomplishments.

Although the Brown Commemoration has a distinct origin—namely, the recommendation of a Diversity Committee that resulted in Chancellor Cantor’s appointment of a Brown Commemoration Planning Committee—by today the commemoration is a very dispersed venture that has been realized by many units, constituencies, and individuals. For example, when the Housing Division engaged the Brown Commemoration, it naturally worked through its own chain of command, down to the resident directors, and from them to the resident assistants, and so on. There is, then, neither a single Brown Commemoration, nor a single vision enlivening the Brown Commemoration. Thus, in the day-to-day events and activities comprising the commemoration we find many and competing ideas about what it means to remember the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and what it means to commemorate it here and now. There are in turn the many consumers of the Brown Commemoration, ranging from people who attend commemoration events, to those in classes affected in some way by commemoration programming. Like the Brown Commemoration producers, these consumers bring a broad range of understanding to their encounters with the commemoration, and in turn they participate in the commemoration dialogue in particular ways. Furthermore, the Brown Commemoration takes on life beyond formal events, for example in off-stage conversations, in passions ignited by the events, and in the forging of new social connections. Clearly, the Brown Commemoration’s domain is expansive: in it are represented many and diverse visions, many and diverse consumers, and many and diverse after-lives. EBC aims to capture the life and feeling of some of this; we make no pretense to cover the commemoration exhaustively.

Ethnography of the University students Rene Bangert, Paul Davis, Nicole Ortegón, and Teresa Ramos

ca. 2005