Rethinking Sex and Gender

 Rethinking Sex and Gender

“Foster an educational environment that is safe and free from discrimination for all students, regardless of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”

I’m glad these are explicitly named because in the federal civil rights act, these identities are not named. Protections for these individuals are not codified into law, but rather only extended by supreme court decisions, which at any point could be taken away and sent back to individual states to decide the rights of these individuals. 

“On May 13, 2016 the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education released joint guidance to help provide educators the information they need to ensure that all students, including transgender students, can attend school in an environment free from discrimination based on sex.”

I thought it was interesting that the Justice Department and the Education Department released joint guidance, so I went to click the link and….. 

Surprise, Surprise, it's not posted on the Department of Education’s website anymore.

“If school staff believes that a gender identity or gender expression issue is presenting itself and creating difficulty for the child in school, approaching the parent(s)/guardian(s) about the issue is appropriate at the elementary level. Together, the family and school can identify appropriate steps to support the student.”

This is really tricky because I know students can be put in danger depending on the home they are living in, if teachers disclose to parents. However, using the statistics stated earlier, we know that students who are experiencing gender dysphoria or trans youth are 3-4 times more likely to self-harm, meaning they are statistically already in more danger.  Every situation is unique, and overall, I know I want students to feel safe in school to express themselves how they want with their friends without the fear of every little thing being reported home. I can see it from the parents' perspective as well, and how they might want to know what is happening to their child while they are in our care as teachers. I was reminded of Shallaby and the freedom of students while reading through this Guidance. Ultimately, we want to keep students safe… does this mean violating the right of privacy to keep students safe? How far do we go with this? I do like that the guidance includes the clause of “creating difficulty” so that staff can contact home, but I’m conflicted, it's tricky. 

Intersex is an umbrella term used to describe variations in physical sex traits or reproductive anatomy that are present at birth or emerge spontaneously later in life, and differ from normative expectations of “male” and “female.”

I enjoyed reading through the trevor project website and really liked how they included intersex when discussing sex. So often, people only think of people in binary terms as either male or female XX or XY. The reality is that intersex individuals exist; it's just a biological fact. It reminded me of this video of a Texas senator https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0FGr0nAxd6Q

Article Summaries

Two Article Summaries

The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies

A Research Review

Christine E. Sleeter

In this article, Sleeter brings to light that many K-12 curricula overwhelmingly center around white figures and experiences. When people of color are brought up in curricula, they are often seen as victims or viewed through a narrow lens. Many students become aware of this bias in education as early as elementary school, and as a result, they become disengaged with school because it doesn't reflect their history or experiences. However, when offered ethnic studies, these students often re-engage, develop critical thinking, and feel more validated and motivated. 

For our district, this is encouraging because I see so many students disengaged with school, and as a teacher, it's painful to watch our students who we want to see succeed write off education and learning as something that is “not for them”. Hopefully, by integrating ethical studies into our classrooms, we can engage more students to become learners and invest in their education.

Teaching Multilingual Children

Virginia Collier 

This article really made me think about how we prepare students for the world without killing their love of learning. One key takeaway was the importance of valuing the different languages and cultures our students bring into the classroom. It laid out seven practical guidelines that center on this idea, like remembering that students use their first language strategies when learning a second, and that our job isn’t to “fix” them but to build on what they already know. We shouldn't teach English in a way that pushes out a student’s home language. Instead, we should teach standard English while encouraging respect for dialect differences, creating a space of language recognition. The article also stressed not punishing kids for code-switching but rather understanding why they do it. Finally, it made a strong case for using literacy programs specifically designed for English learners and taking a balanced approach that includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Project Proposal

I was inspired by the documentary we watched, Precious Knowledge, and the Sleeter article to focus my project on better supporting the MLL (Multilingual Learner) population at our school and making our curriculum more culturally responsive.

My goal is to develop a set of lessons and strategies that teachers can implement in their classrooms to more effectively engage and serve MLL students. I plan to present these resources to our district’s MLL coordinator as a way to contribute to broader efforts toward equity and inclusion.

Canary in the Coal mine

Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School

Carla Shalaby 

“Criminalizing troublemakers is part of our historic and cultural routine. People who demand the rights of others to be free, like Mahatma Gandhi, Assata Shakur, Nelson Mandela, Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Angela Davis, to name just a few—are regularly detained, jailed, and systematically harassed by officers of the state.” 

The analogies here are a bit of a jump. Comparing famous freedom fighters with students who are chronically in trouble. I get the main idea here is to simply point out that our reaction to any actions against the mainstream or powers in charge is to criminalize, lock up, or sequester away, but in Shalaby’s own words, her students were “talking over classmates, being physically aggressive and destroying classroom items”. I applaud her willingness to fight for the freedom of these students, but I wonder about the freedom of other students in class. What about their freedom to be in a safe school where they aren’t physically assaulted in school, or be heard and have a voice in class? Maybe I’m just being defensive because this is my profession, or maybe it’s because I was the shy, quiet kid who was talked over and pushed aside. This is just my honest reaction to many parts of this text. I did try to find quotes and ideals that agree with as well.

“We generally think of “deviance” and of deviant people, as a problem. I have learned to think of deviance as informative.”

I like this approach, trying to take morality out of your perception of behaviors. This is very important when working as a teacher and dealing with behaviors all day long. Off days or deviant behavior from kids is normal and to be expected. They are testing boundaries and learning how to interact with their environment and peers.

“The child who deviates, who refuses to behave like everybody else, maybe telling us loudly, visibly, and memorably that the arrangements of our schools are harmful to human beings.”

This quote to me helped me understand Shalaby’s main argument in the text, which was that these students are “singing” or alerting us that our schools are not set up well or that they are toxic. I think the child who deviates could do so for a plethora of reasons some having to do with how schools are run; curricula that aren't culturally responsive (Sleeter), Not being explicitly taught how to navigate a system of power that has different rules from their own culture (Delpit), or even teachers who unconscious bias against students of color. I additionally think there are many systems in these “troublemakers'” lives that like outside of the school walls and contribute more to their behavior, like poverty or untreated mental health struggles, which are not due to the arrangement of the school. 

Rethinking Schools- Opportunity you can taste

Shock-Doctrine Schooling in Haiti

Neoliberalism off the Richter scale

By Jesse Hagopain

Illustrator: Brian Stauffer

When I was looking through articles, I chose charter schools as a topic to explore. I used to work for one, and it's a topic that I am more interested in learning about. They primarily pop up in areas of low income as an alternative to struggling public schools. When looking through the articles, I saw many articles not talking about low income but rather the privatization of education in communities that recently experienced natural disasters: Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and the earthquakes of Haiti in 2010. Seeing that trend, I was curious to learn more. 

The author first speaks about the tragic loss of the island. The Haitian Government estimated that at least 38,000 students and more than 1,300 teachers/educational personnel died in the earthquake. This is tragic and almost hard to imagine happening in the United States. I can't recall a natural disaster that caused the death of over 38,000 children; it’s unimaginable to me. It reminds me of an earthquake in China that disproportionately affected school buildings and brought up the question of safety in building codes for school buildings. 

“The buildings may have collapsed, but the truth was that the seismic activity of free market principles had shattered the educational system in Haiti long before Jan. 12, 2010” 

Even though the earthquake destroyed many of the school buildings, shutting down the education system, over 90% of the schools in Haiti before the earthquake were private schools. Parents, on average, spend 40% of their income on schooling for their children, and unfortunately, can not afford to educate all their children. 

-Only ⅔ of Haiti’s kids were enrolled in school

-less than ⅓ made it to the 6th grade

-Secondary schools only enroll 20% of eligible children

This lack of access to education and Poverty has created a system of domestic servitude called the restavek system,  in which parents send their children to work for a host household in exchange for a place to live and food to eat. A breakdown in the education system has forced Haiti into a system of indentured child servitude as a way to help care for children. About 225,00 Haitian children are estimated to be living in this system of servitude. These statistics are shocking and highlight the role public education plays in society, which I think in the US is so often overlooked and taken for granted, given the strong push for voucher systems in some parts of the country.

Who is coming to save Haiti’s school system?

The answer, Paul Vallas Former CEO of Chicago and Philadelphia Public School Systems, and also who Louisiana hired in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to restructure the New Orleans school system. 

I found it interesting that one person seemed to be at the center of all this reform in inner city and post-disaster school systems. Jumping from city to city, remaking them in his image. As I went down this twisting rabbit hole of school reform, I was only more confused as time went by… By some reports, school districts touched by his reform had their test scores increase, and budgets were suddenly balanced. Sounds great, but when I looked further in another article (linked here) Vallas took funds that were specifically designated towards teacher pension programs to balance the deficit in the general budget in Chicago. In Louisiana, he completely disbanded all New Orleans public schools and made them over as charter schools. The Programs he led fired all the former unionized teachers, who were primarily black middle-aged professionals, and replaced them with inexperienced, mostly white Teach for America recruits (anti-affirmative action).  It is clear that the more I read about him, I know he has an anti-teacher's union standpoint and is an advocate for charter schools and school choice.

The Article repeatedly refers to his views as neoliberal, which I had to look up. 

Neoliberalism- a political and economic ideology that advocates for free-market capitalism.

Now that I had the definition, I began to understand that Vallas thinks open competition between schools (charter model) is better because it makes education into a free market where competition creates a better and better product. Except students aren’t products, they are people, people struggling with poverty or in the wake of natural disasters. Vallas treated them as an opportunity to experiment with his free market theory of education. His own words here are rather odd when taken in with full context “There's a real opportunity here. I can taste it. That is why I’ve flown [to Haiti] so many times.” I don’t know if that comment was made after the earthquake, but it's a little disturbing. Later in the article, the author criticizes the United States and the international community as having an “Impulse to dominate rather than to aid” when working with Haiti. 

Specifically in Haiti, Vallas’ model was to keep the model of 90% of the schools being private, but have the government subsidize many of those schools with the promise of reduced tuition. Vallas’ program did not deliver on the promise of creating a quality education system with their 4.2 billion dollar plan. Trailers were brought in to serve as classrooms for the students. These trailers had inadequate ventilation and sometimes would reach temperatures of over 100 degrees, and students had to be moved outside. Many of the trailers had high levels of formaldehyde, and students reported often getting headaches and needing medication to continue lessons. Vallas is quoted as saying, “there  are ways to create a classroom learning environment that can be a superior learning environment, even if that classroom is an inadequate building. “  In addition to the trailer issue, many schools reported that the payments from Vallas’ program didn't arrive on time, and they had not received the promised textbooks or supplies. It was also reported that Vallas' program paid private school teachers about 6x more than teachers from the public schools. 

The Last thing about the article I found really interesting is the money. Of all the federal aid to Haiti, just 48.6 million or just over 2% has gone directly to Haitian organizations and firms. Comparatively, more than 1.2 billion or 56% has gone to firms located in Washington DC, Maryland or Virginia.” In reality, very little of this money is going and staying in Haiti. Most of the money comes right back to the US, and all Haiti gets to keep are some trailers with extra formaldehyde. 

The book The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is referenced and quoted in the article, and I found the book on an online library here.

The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies

The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies

A research review 

Christine E. Sleeter

“At first Carlos had no Interest in more school, but his friend was so enthusiastic that Carlos finally decided to go see what Chicano studies is all about.” 

When I first read this section on Carlos having no interest in school but finding interest in Chicano studies at the higher ed level, I immediately thought of the concept of culturally responsive teaching. I learned about this practice when taking other classes at RIC in the TESOL program, and my understanding is that students should be able to see their culture reflected in their school in some way, and this will increase engagement. I teach science, so often we are discussing content that doesn’t necessarily revolve around people specifically. To make my classroom more responsive, I tend to give students more choice so that they can have the opportunity to learn about something closer to their own culture. For example, if we are doing work on biospheres, students can choose a part of the world they have more interest in learning about. 

“Asian Americans and Latinos appear mainly as figures on the landscape with virtually no history or contemporary ethnic experience.”

I found this quote interesting because in my own experience, I really can’t remember learning about Latinos at all in my education. As for Asian Americans, I think we read a story in elementary school- Sadako

1000 paper cranes (a Japanese bombing survivor sick from radiation), and we did learn about the Japanese internment camps. Both of these are victimized accounts of this group, which never lets these groups be anything but victims in the eyes of students. 

“For example, although white 5th graders believe that the Bill of Rights gives rights to everyone, about half of the black children pointed out that not everyone has rights.”

It's interesting that black students, as early as fifth grade, are starting to express that the reality of Black students is not reflected in their teaching in class.  

Main Argument- The author argues that culturally responsive teaching is important in engaging students. If students feel they are represented in the classroom, they will be more likely to have a positive relationship with education.

Ending DEI

 Is DEI what’s really undermining our National Unity?

“Hard-working Americans who deserve a shot at the American dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex” (page 2)

Well, maybe not ALL hardworking Americans… I bring up President Trump's recent ban on transgender people serving in the military because, in my opinion, this ban contradicts his Executive Order to end “illegal discrimination”. The executive order does very little to uphold civil rights and create equal opportunity among American citizens who are actually experiencing discrimination. Members of the LGBTQ+ community commonly experience discrimination like this, whether it be from local governments legislating their daily lives, like what bathrooms they can use, or religious institutions/individuals legally denying them service.

The fact that President Trump is supposedly fighting to end illegal discrimination with this EO (executive order) while also banning transgender military members and firing existing trans members is wild to me. To quote his EO “Americans should not be stigmatized, demeaned or shut out of opportunities,” but here is a quote from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the article linked here

“No More Trans @ DoD,” Hegseth wrote in a post on X. Earlier in the day, before the court acted, Hegseth said that his department is leaving wokeness and weakness behind.

“No more pronouns,” he told a special operations forces conference in Tampa. “No more dudes in dresses. We’re done with that s—.”

Referring to trans people as “dudes and dresses” sounds pretty demeaning and stigmatizing to me. In my opinion, this EO plays into the fear of white Americans that they are being hurt by DEI or Affirmative action, by either getting passed up on job opportunities or that jobs are going to unworthy applicants because of their race. Maybe this is a real issue, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know if we have the evidence to prove either way. What I do know is that the true goal of this EO is to attack the progressive ideology around DEI and not to create equality. 

“Excise references to DEI and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear,

from federal acquisition, contracting, grants, and financial assistance procedures, to

streamline those procedures, improve speed, and efficiency, lower cost, and comply

with civil rights laws“ (c ii page3)

From my understanding here the aim is to erase all “DEI principles” from anywhere in the federal government.

To me this seems like putting the blinders on or sticking our heads in the sand when it comes to equity. If we are

no longer providing grants to research equity and diversity, and we just stop looking into it, how will we know

if there is any progress? There are many parallels you could draw to this and the Colorblindness reading from

Armstrong and Wildman, which states, “The failure to acknowledge racial reality in the United States reinforces

and solidifies existing racial inequality and white privilege.”

Additionally, I found it interesting in Section 4 how explicit the plan was to target the private sector and non-profits

if they didn’t comply by getting rid of their DEI principles or programs. One of my friends works for Walmart in

data, and I remember that after the election, he was concerned when the company notified them it was canceling

all of its DEI practices. It seems that many companies anticipated this crackdown and abandoned their DEI

programs to avoid potential consequences.

We know so far in higher ed, the Trump administration is trying to go after universities like Harvard, and who

knows how successful they will be in getting colleges and universities to change their DEI programs, practices,

and even curriculum. Affirmative Action has already been struck down for almost two years now, so it seems

like they must be reaching to eliminate it in all forms from campuses (war on an ideology). It is uncertain how

this will affect K-12 public education. Who knows if Title 1 spending for underserved populations, urban or rural,

will be deemed illegal or wasteful? Time will tell