I want her to have teachers who reflect on and actualize a posture that brings full acceptance to the humanity of her person.
This sentence made me feel the author's sadness and persistence as a mother. She didn't want others to see Lydia as a child with disabilities, but as a real person with personality, interests and abilities. In fact, many similar students also hope that teachers will remember the student themselves, rather than the troublesome student who needs special help.
Being defined in school settings as an Other limits Lydia's ability to construct her own identity. This positioning also causes feelings of shame and pain for Lydia, and pain, loss, and grief for me as her mother, as some of the incidents above suggest.
Schools are such a huge influence in shaping children’s self-perception. When Lydia was treated as an “other,” it not only affected how others treated her, but also how she saw herself. It was heartbreaking. Everyone should have the opportunity to define themselves and not be constrained by the way others see them.
She is not her diagnosis or "category." Her potential cannot be defined by her disability label. I want her to have teachers who reflect on and actualize a posture that brings full acceptance to the humanity of her person.
This sentence reminds me that after many students are labeled, it is difficult to be regarded as a complete person. Like Lydia, with the label of special needs, others can easily ignore her interests, personality and abilities. She is not synonymous with cognitive impairment, she is a child with unique ideas. The school should see what the child can do, not just what she lacks.
This model image was created not by Asian Americans but by influential whites for their public ideological use.39 One example is a 1960s U.S. News & World Report article entitled “Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S.” This major media article praised the hard work and morality of Chinese Americans, and its analysis strongly implied that if black Americans possessed such virtues, it would not be necessary to spend “hundreds of billions to uplift” them
This makes it clear that the model minority myth is not organic, but a tool used to divide minority groups. It looks positive but actually causes harm by denying Asian Americans’ struggles and fueling competition between racial communities.
The American public educational system was created to give all kids, regardless of their family origins, a chance co improve their lot in life. The system has been substantially expanded and transformed three times during the past two centuries, and each time a core objective was level-ing the playing field.
I think this is one of the core ideas of this chapter, but Putnam points out, through a lot of evidence in the following text, that the current system is deviating from this original intention and exacerbating class gaps.
Some of my friends began practicing for the SAT in our freshman year. People would get 2200, and half would say, "I have to go back and take it again." Everybody is friends and everything, but some-times you can feel it. 1he only bad thing about chat is that it's almost like a double-edged sword that you have to be in the cop 10-12 per-cent. Getting Bs was considered failing. I went back this August to speak in an old class of mine to se-niors about college applications, and being back in chat environment I could actually feel it this time. When you're in it, you don't really chink about it, but coming back I could really feel like the pressure chat they had on themselves. You're in a bubble at Troy.
Excessive competition can deprive students of the joy of learning and exacerbate mental health issues, especially in well-resourced schools.
What is decidedly not similar about these two schools, however, are their student populations, as measured by poverty rates, ethnic backgrounds, English proficiency, and even physical fitness. Santa Ana students are overwhelmingly poor and Latino and heavily Spanish-speaking, whereas Troy students come from ethnically diverse, eco-nomically upscale backgrounds. More striking still are the contrasts in the "output" measures of the two schools-graduation rates, statewide academic and SAT test scores, truancy and suspension rates. Students at Santa Ana are four times more likely than students at Troy to drop out, roughly ten rimes more likely to be truant or suspended, and only one third as likely to take the SAT. If they do take the SAT, on average they score in the bottom quartile nationwide, whereas the average SAT taker at Troy scores in the top 10-15 percent. In this chapter, we will meet children from two Mexican American families with firsthand experience of these two schools: Isabella and her parents, Clara and Ricardo, who live in north Fullerton, just a few blocks from Troy High; and Lola and Sofia, two sisters who were raised
This sentence emphasizes the huge difference in student backgrounds between two schools with similar “input” resources. This difference directly affects educational outcomes, indicating that the students’ social environment itself already carries structural inequality.