Financial Status and Test Scores

When researching PSAE scores for my last blog post, I came across a very interesting blog post which I believe was written by a concerned parent in the Proviso school district. The post explored PSAE test score data, looking for a connection between the amount of low income students at public Illinois schools and the test scores of that school. The post can be found here, and the post before it from which the data is here. Earlier in the year, as a class we discussed the clear correlation between income and test scores, and considering that both are on average very high at New Trier, it is definitely worth looking critically at this data. The first post contains data about the amount of low income students at each school, the percentage of passing PSAE scores at the school, and the amount of money spent per student at the school. In the second post, the author uses the data to find the percentage of non-low income students that meet or exceed PSAE standards. The first thing I noticed was that New Trier had both the highest test scores and least number of low income students in all of Illinois. I also noticed that at ETHS almost 100% of non-low income students pass the PSAE, while only about 66% of the whole school meets the standards. This huge difference in test scores between students of different financial status is even more alarming because the students attend the same school. This data definitely supports Doc Oc's point from when we discussed this earlier in the year, that standardized tests measure socioeconomic status rather than knowledge.

Illinois and the PSAE

In class we talked briefly about the ACT and PSAE that we all took last week. In many of my classes, students discussed their feelings about the PSAE, and the general consensus was that the non-ACT portion of the test was very simple. Students made fun of the basic addition questions (wedding photographer) on the math portion and the simple textual comprehension questions (is a hamper a bin or a washing machine?) in the reading section. My curiosity was peaked, however, when someone mentioned that the majority of students in Illinois do not pass the test. Unable to believe this, i did some searching to see what percentage of students passed and what a passing grade entailed. I was able to find an interesting statistic here, stating that 92% of New Trier students met or exceeded PSAE standards, a very impressive percentage, especially when you consider that it is likely that at least a small percentage of New Trier students make no effort to answer correctly because the test does not get sent to colleges and they are taking it the very next day after the very stressful ACT. As for the state average in illinois, according to data found here, last year 54% of Illinois passed PSAE reading, 52.7% passed math, and 52.4% passed science. While this data does not show that the majority of Illinois fails the PSAE, it does show that there is a great difference between the scores at New Trier and the state average.

Gatsby and the Fundamental Decencies

When reading the first few pages of The Great Gatsby, I was struck by a certain statement on page 2, the narrator's notion that "a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth". My curiosity was peaked when I read this quote because I have occasionally wondered if a concept like that were the truth. At first it seems irrational, but when you think about it we are all different and we each have a different "sense of the fundamental decencies" (assuming that my understanding of this phrase is correct). Some people are more kind than others, some are more athletic, some are more intelligent. This is not to say that some people are somehow better than others, but merely that we are all unique and our skills and talents all lie in different areas. When I began thinking about the meaning of this quote, I googled the passage to see what others had said about it. I was led to a Yahoo Answers page where the general consensus was that the narrator was stating that "rich people are born with better ethics/morals/outlook than poor people". I have not read more than a few pages of the book so far, so I cannot say for sure if this is or isn't the narrator's overall point of view, but at least at this point I don't feel that this is at all what he is saying. He is not saying that a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth, favoring wealthy people, or that those with a better sense of these decencies will end up being wealthy. In fact, in this statement, wealth is not brought up at all. But maybe I'm just missing something.

Remix Culture

I have just finished watching two films, one a lecture by lawrence lessig titled "Keeping Culture Free" (here) and a documentary called RiP: Remix Manifesto which follows Girl Talk and Lessig, looking at remix culture around the world (here). Both of these films were immensely interesting and I have learned much more than I had expected to about copyright law and the restrictions it tries to place on the remix and sampling of media. Girl talk, a musician who creates songs by taking small samples of many songs and combining them, has not been able to release an album because of the great risk of being sued by the companies that own the rights to the media he samples. These presentations often focused on the idea that culture always builds upon itself, and restricting artists ability to use the culture they could build on is a hindrance on culture in general. One example that struck me was Disney. RiP: Remix Manifesto used Disney as an example of culture building upon itself because of the way movies like Snow White, Cinderella, and Alice in Wonderland were all modern remakes of fairy tales. The difference in this case, however, is how Disney copyrighted these works and the characters in them so that nobody could build upon what they had built upon. They also were able to get copyright law extended greatly, so that their exclusive access to these fairy tales would last even longer.

Eyes on the Prize

I was listening to more of Macklemore's music and one line from the chorus stuck out to me, "Each moment's precious, don't let life pass you by, keep focused keep your eyes on the prize." Of course, this line stuck out because of the phrase "eyes on the prize" which happened to be the name of the documentary we recently watched in class. I realize that this connection is merely a coincidence, but it gives me a chance to point out some more of Macklemore's lyrics that are relevant to the topics we have been discussing in class, civil rights and equality. In one of his songs, Claiming The City, he talks about the problems in his city, Seattle, that were around when he grew up but he hopes will be improved by the time his children are "claiming the city". He talks about growing up with two parents and two cars and then realizing when he was older that most people did not grow up like him when he found out "there was something called a social status and my black friends weren't in my financial bracket". He also says that although he went to a diverse school, the city is still "divided neighborhood to neighborhood". In my opinion one of the most powerful lines in the song is, "to think that we claim that so much has changed since Brown vs. the Board of Education and Roe vs. Wade, but around my way it all stays the same, they just figured out a way to separate the black and white race"

The Power of Education

Recently we have been working on a project that focuses on thinking up an alternative way that reconstruction could have gone that would have been more successful. One of the sections of reconstruction and freedman integration into American society that I believe could have improved the whole scenario if it was more prevalent is education. In the modern day, education is a topic that has been in the news frequently and was addressed by President Obama during his State of the Union address. I've been thinking about why this is and why education is seen as so important by most people. This lead me to recalling a phrase, "if you give a man a fish he eats for a day, if you teach him how to fish he eats for life". This concept can be applied to how I think reconstruction should have gone, with education as the biggest priority. When we consider ways that reconstruction could have been revised, it may seem like a good idea at first to have given freedmen money or payment for their many years of working with no pay. However, I think it would have been a much better idea to use that money to give them access to a first-class education. It is my belief that the majority of problems and struggles of freedmen such as sharecropping and racism would have been solved or avoided by offering them the same access to education right from the start as the white people received.

White Privilege

During Mondays class we talked briefly about the Grammys. We had been discussing the portrayal of black people in the media and performance before that, and the two topics relate heavily. A lot of the portrayals that I listed during Friday's class about black people in the media came from my exposure to rap music and the "masks" that many black rappers use to attract listeners. All these discussions reminded me of a song titled "White Privilege" made by one of my favorite rappers, a white rapper called Macklemore. The song talks about how white rappers like himself are essentially invading the rap culture created by black people, and the importance of recognizing that although "good music is good music regardless of what you look like" it "doesn't change the fact that this culture's not mine" (lyrics from White Privilege, read all the lyrics here). He talks about how hip hop was created to counteract the struggles of being black in a horribly racist society, a struggle that he's never been through. He also mentions an idea that I have observed in the past but never really thought much of. The fact that the majority of fans at rap concerts tend to be white, even if the performer is black. Thinking back about the times I saw Kanye West and Nas & Damien Marley, I definitely recall seeing this. I would say the audience was at least 80-90% white, and seeing as the concerts were both in Chicago, that is not the ratio you would expect to see. I also noticed this line in the song, which I liked: "we still owe them 40 acres now we've stolen their 16 bars"