Author: Amanda Gurren

Facilitation Questions

1)   Marianne Lado describes her experience of living in Westport, CT and the uneasy feeling she had about the contrasts that existed between her hometown and Bridgeport: “In physics class we got on the subject of SAT scores. And this one student was arguing that the high SAT scores in Westport prove people in Westport are smarter than people in Bridgeport. But it was more than that. He was saying that we lived in Westport because our parents are smarter and that people in Bridgeport aren’t as smart and that’s why they are where they are. As if this were a kind of natural selection. I’d laugh because I thought he was joking, making fun of that point of view. But he was serious. I was constantly amazed by the ease with which that logic thrived in that environment. It sounds naïve now, but I remember being shocked—after the sixties and Martin Luther King—that people my age would think like that. It always stuck with me” (103).

 

How would you counter this argument based on the facts presented in The Children in Room E4 (for example, Connecticut’s state policy regarding education *pg.90) and from what we have learned thus far in the seminar (refer to readings “People Place and Opportunity,” “School Choice in Suburbia”, etc.—as well as class discussions)

 

2)   In the reading, Eaton mentions various cases that have been brought to the U.S. Supreme Court prior to the trial of Sheff vs. O’Neill—three of which are listed below. In the cases we have listed, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the state. Although the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff in the case of Sheff vs. O’Neill (2003), what are the actual implications of this ruling based on the fact that none of the court mandated guidelines have been fulfilled thus far?

 

To answer this question, we ask each group to click their respective link and share with the class the main points and the final rulings of each case. As a class, we will discuss why and how the Sheff vs. O’Neill case is different. Based on the state’s response to the ruling thus far, do you believe that the state has made educational equality a priority?

 

1. San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973) “Rodriguez’s plaintiffs were Mexican American parents from a poor section of San Antonio called Edgewood. Their case, built on Brown’s precedent, challenged Texas’s property-tax-based funding, which had allocated fewer education dollars to property-poor districts and more to rich ones. But the Supreme Court, asserting that education was not a “fundamental” right in the Constitution and invoking the importance of “local control,” ruled that Texas’s unequal school-funding scheme was constitutional.” (pg.88)
2. b.    Board of Education of Oklahoma v. Dowell (1991)“…The Court had allowed the Oklahoma City school board to dismantle its existing court-ordered desegregation plan and knowingly re-create extremely racially segregated schools. In Dowell, the Court established that once a lower court had declared a previously segregated school “unitary,” or free of the vestiges of its prior “segregation,” then the school district might be released from its court-ordered desegregation plan, even if throwing out such a plan returned a district to segregation levels as high as those that existed before Brown, if not higher” (pg. 287).
3. Missouri v. Jenkins (1995)

i.     “It ruled that education-related remedies to segregation—remedial programs, for example—need not demonstrate that they’ve ameliorated inequalities or even improved student achievement” (pg.287).

ii.     “…The Court defined desegregation as a temporary punishment, not as a worthy goal” (pg. 287).

 

3)   What conclusions did Susan Eaton draw about Hartford’s public schools? Do they differ from your own—and if so, how (hint: pg. 330, pg. 344) ?

 

 

4)   “Anyone can frame an anecdote about a heavy smoker who never got cancer; yet that does not prove, Rothstein reminds us, that smoking does not cause cancer” (192). Explain the significance of the quotation in context of the book. 

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