Humanities Homework Help

I’m studying and need help with a English question to help me learn.

CASE ONE

Mr. Smith, a white male in his 50’s, has been the principal of Apple High School for 20 years. Apple School is located in an urban city with a diverse population, and more recently, it has become the receiving center for a growing number of refugees from Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Middle East. Mr. Smith has believed that the best way to serve non-English speaking students is to help them assimilate to the new culture as fast as possible. Students are placed in English-only classes, given “American” names, and penalized for speaking in their native language on school premises, which has been designated an English-only zone. The school has had high rates of drop out, low college attendance rates, and very low standardized test scores; in fact, the lowest in the school district, but these statistics have gotten worse. Until recently, these outcomes were blamed on individual, family, and community abilities and factors that were thought to be beyond the school’s control. However, the district found out that there were schools in a neighboring county with similar demographics where students are consistently achieving greater academic success than at Apple High School. The district has hired you as an educational consultant to work with Mr. Smith and his staff to improve the educational outcomes of the students.

What steps would you take to examine the situation at the school and what recommendations would you provide the school?

CASE TWO

The local school district is looking to change their second-grade curriculum to be more inclusive and diversify the books used during lessons in the classroom. School district officials reach out to you as a curriculum developer and ask you to design a curriculum which is representative of the student population and includes books which are relevant to all children’s lives. As you develop the classroom curriculum, you choose to include many books which talk about racial injustice at an age-appropriate level, such as The Story of Ruby Bridges (Coles, 1995). After designing lessons related to the book and completing a curriculum unit around race, you release your curriculum to the School Board and subsequently the community. Upon learning of the inclusion of The Story of Ruby Bridges, white families begin challenging its inclusion, calling for its removal from the curriculum. White community members respond that the book depicts white people as being mean and there being no redemption of white folks at the end of the story. The school district in response to the white families has explained the choice to include The Story of Ruby Bridges is up to you as the curriculum designer, and express support for whichever decision.

How do you address the unsatisfied families? Using the current debate around Critical Race Theory and its place in schools, what would you do about the inclusion of The Story of Ruby Bridges in the second-grade curriculum?