...ind Act of President George W. Bush have exemplified this egalitarian ethos. These programs have resulted in millions of dollars of new tests, regulations, and procedures, not to mention a burgeoning industry designed to help students and schools meet them. Undeniably, the message behind these efforts is noble and worthwhile—no good shall ever come of having a nation of subpar, undereducated students—but it is necessary to consider those who it n...
...e Professor of Sociology at Columbia University: I’m not sure which achievement gap we’re talking about. There are lots of them. Girls do far better than boys in school. There’s a gap between black and white students, Asians perform better than just about any other group. But a lot of these stories (except for the gender one) are about class (race and class position are highly correlated; the average black family made $32,946 in...
...he development of the Global Core credit distribution requirement for undergraduates, but also the increase in global applicants. Columbia is not alone: Nationally, the class of 2012 saw an eight percent rise in international students compared to the previous year. Part of that is a natural push – in February 2011, Grinnell College told the New York Times that almost one in 10 of its applicants that year were Chinese international students. But u...
From Wikimedia Commons Given my recent fascination with student protest movements, Montréal was an obvious destination for my spring break. For the past several years now, the province of Québec has been caught in the midst of the largest student uprisings in North American history. In response to tuition hikes announced several years ago, students launched a general strike that reached its climax last spring with hundreds of thousands of peopl...
...rs they had earned in the factories. In the south, literacy tests were administered to bar African Americans from voting. Despite the fact that over 300 languages are spoken in the United States, two-thirds of all high school students graduate without studying a foreign language. The United States has no official language, but speaking English has consistently been at the core of the “American” identity. A gesture of interest While working for C...
llustration by Maddy Kloss Some of the snapshots from Chile’s ongoing student movement depict a lighthearted mobilization. Led by the charismatic Camila Vallejo, the students have used Twitter and Facebook to stage kiss-a-thons and superhero-themed costume protests. But other images have been more violent. Protesters have taken to the streets and set fire to government buildings and private businesses. In return, they have been bombarded with w...
...VH: I got involved in the #Yosoy132 movement through my university. It was after the media manipulated what happened when the presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN) went to the Iberoamerican University. Thousands of students protested against him and then uploaded their videos on Youtube. Meanwhile, the media said that the people involved in the protest where “acarreados y porros” (recruited and paid participants to protest) and that hi...
Rampant apathy and cynicism. Growing civic disengagement. Hedonistic individualism. These accusations have often been leveled at our generation of students. The lack of traditional engagement by the 18-24-year-old cohort has been seen as the end of student activism. But these criticisms are blind to the diversity and subtle power of the student action happening today. Unlike activism during the Vietnam War, there is no unifying cry, no single me...
...need to know why the protests happened, how they were organized, what worked and what didn’t work, and what we owe to those who stood up and fought. This is absolutely not to say no one is doing this — there are and have been students working to create and sustain an institutional memory. However, this is to say we need more: More students, more memory, more protest. Why do we need an institutional memory? Perhaps most importantly, we need it so...
...’s schools that many mainstream politicians, business leaders, and philanthropists have favored for several decades. These include using standardized tests as a major determinant of teacher compensation, closing schools whose students fail to meet certain benchmarks, and opening charter schools as alternatives to public schools. While the aim of such policies is to increase accountability and quality, critics believe they reflect the logic of pro...
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