Contemporary Context of Education

Goldstein and Nieto believe that the contemporary challenges that educators face in the 21st century today are low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. As much as teachers do not want to be political in their classrooms, politics revolves heavily when they dictate everything and can interfere with the development of classrooms. Ellie Rubinstein from Illinois stated “Everything I loved about teaching is extinct. Curriculum is mandated. Minutes spent teaching subjects are audited. Schedules are dictated by administrators. The classroom teacher is no longer trusted or in control of what, when, or how she teaches.” (Goldstein, 2014, p. 3) The nature of being a teacher is multifaceted, problems like inadequate supplies and low pay are being linked to external sources like government funding towards that specific school. Nieto also states that “There is no question that teachers and students are influenced, positively and negatively… these contexts include insufficient resources, punitive school policies, and unquestioned negative ideologies about the abilities of students and teachers alike.” (p. 17) The challenges that teachers are facing today are shaped by contemporary politics because it affects what they teach and how they’ll teach it. Teachers are puppets under political standards and teachers have to comply and follow and not left with a choice on how they can dictate their own classroom.

The challenges that educators face today are related to U.S history is the increase of diversity in the American population. While school should be an equalizer for students of all different ethnicities, they are always put at a disadvantage and their education is not as inclusive as their counterparts. Nieto states that “two of the most damaging societal ideologies are that students’ social and cultural identities and backgrounds determine their intelligence and ability, and that intelligence is fixed and unchanging. These ideologies find their way into school policies and practices through the actions of educators, administrators, and policymakers.” (p.12) Classrooms are diversifying more and more each day. If teachers, administrators, and policymakers keep having these unchanging, incorrect prejuducied thoughts about students from different background, then they are constantly pushing non-white students down instead of allowing them to grow. Nieto writes “..they are based on deficit perceptions about what students are capable of accomplishing, it is evident that negative ideologies get in the way of student learning...taken together, social and school conditions and negative perceptions and expectations of students are a poisonous brew that gets in the way of the nation’s stated ideals of equal education.” (p.13). The United States foundation is based on immigration and we are starting to see more diversity in the American classroom. I believe that teachers are facing constant struggles trying to help students with different backgrounds because the system is going to automatically oppress students and has been doing that for many years.

I agree with Goldstein’s claim that teaching is the most embattled profession in the United States because our expectations for our teachers are so high but society as a whole does not appreciate them like they should. Teachers are constantly put under extraneous amounts of pressure and standards in today’s society. Goldstein writes that “In south Korea, teachers are referred to as “nation builders”. In Finland, both men and women name teaching as among the top three most desirable professions for a source. Meanwhile, that old American saw-“those who can’t do, teach”- continues to reverberate, reflecting elite concession towards career educators” ( p.6) Nieto shows that “A study of over 1,200 K-12 teachers nationwide found that the five top stressors associated with teaching are…having too many responsibilities, lacking control over decisions that affect students, and being constantly subject to accountability measures.” (p.15) We expect teachers to be able to close the gap between poor and middle class children while also dealing with nationwide testing standards, all while receiving low pay and low funding for their classrooms. Teachers are now being faced with an exuberant amount of responsibilities and not being compensated mentally, physically, and mentally.

The sociopolitical factors that Nieto argues are essential to understanding the work of teaching and learning are curriculum, political influences, and social influences. These three sociopolitical factors have an impact on the value on education, parental support, structural inequality, etc. Nieto states that “the proposed remedy has worsened the problem. Rather than more meaningful teacher education and professional development, smaller classes, better pay for teachers, and more resources for poor schools…[they] put in place an unparalleled program of mandated standardized tests that has significantly changed the nature of teaching and learning for millions of teachers and students around the nation.” (pg.5) Schools are being marketized into competing against another on who has better scores, and even teachers within the same schools are competing against each other to see who can do better. Teachers are being put under strenuous working conditions to help their schools raise money or can also be in jeopardy of them losing their own jobs. Another example that Nieto writes about is about standardized testing and how “common core has the potential to raise expectations for student learning and enhance the quality of the curriculum, it comes with several potentially troubling problems. One is the claim that it will raise student achievement. Yet according to a recent study... changes to the state standards over the past twenty years have had little, if any impact on student achievement.” (p.5) Teachers are putting more emphasis on state standards because many policymakers want to have certain goals to be endorsed, which are fundamentally flawed.

Wayne Au shows that the reasons why the government was able to justify the high stakes testing as a tool for equity was to prove that anyone not white/rich, were less superior. These tests were brought into the mass public schools because they wanted to be able to track kids of color and the poor and build on the assumption that they would never amount up to anything other than just workers. He goes to state that it is “important to recognize that high-stakes tests are not race-neutral tools capable of promoting racial equality. At their origins more than 100 years ago, standardized tests were used as weapons against communities of color, immigrants, and the poor. Because they were presumed to be objective, tests results were used to prove that whites, the rich and the U.S. born were biologically more intelligent than non-whites, the poor, and immigrants.” (p. 244) Au also shows that even people of higher power like “Stanford professor Lewis Terman argued that certain races inherited “deficient” IQs, saying that ‘no amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens.’ He further asserted that …children of this group should be segregated… and these students were unable to master abstractions” (p.244) These tests from the very beginning were set up for black and brown students to fail. Au shows that these tests were made to make sure that students of different ethnicities and lower socioeconomic statuses keep them oppressed and not continue to grow.