Reach 110 Equity (Teaching for Equity Resources)

I browsed several websites, and it appears that there are a lot of different resources out there on the topic. I would like to take the initiative over the summer and choose one or two good readings on this subject as it hits a personal chord with me. I hope that I can be steered in the right direction by my coach to narrowing down some possible reading for the summer break.


I took a look at one particular reading on one of the suggested websites. It was Brian D. Schultz's Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way. This might be one of the reading I look into over the s ummer. According to the article, a fifth grade teacher by the name of Brian Schultz who worked in Chicago's Cabrini Green neighborhood took a group of fifth grade students in room 405 to work on a sophisticated advocacy plan calling for a new school building. Brian Schultz their teacher and author of the book, enacted a social action project with the fifth graders to address their concerns. Although the school was never built, their actions did gain a lot of media attention and supporters including Ralph Nader.

The article goes on to discuss how many teachers due to the rigidity of testing and scripted curricula are limited in the likelihood of the enactment of social change or action projects. Many times teachers are so focused and under such pressure to pour all of their energy, resources, and planning into meeting the standards and preparing students for state tests that they have no room to develop projects that address issues of social change.

Finally, it made me think of one of the reasons I have stayed in education for so long. I stay for exactly that reason: social change. I see that at Rocketship we reach out to our families to be involved in things like the upcoming PACT meeting in which the community is able to ask questions of public officials about schools of choice in the community. We do things at Rocketship that are not part of most public schools. Reaching beyond just the adults, this article made me think about what we can do with all of those students who sit in our classrooms everyday. There are so many social issues out there to make society a better place. What is possible is that these social action projects can be done in a way that will simultaneously develop activist and standards-oriented academic skills. This idea is definately one worth futher exploration.