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The following are lesson plans relating Brown to contemporary issues in education.
NOTE: In order to access and print the Downloaded Lesson Plans
and Student Activity Sheets for each lesson, you will need Adobe
Acrobat. If you do not already have this tool, you may download
Adobe Acrobat free of charge at the Adobe Web site.
Background: Fifty years after the Brown v. Board of Education
decision outlawed segregated schools, many students today still
find themselves attending segregated schools. Upon examining the
statistics, it is safe to say that a major factor in today's segregation
is poverty. According to statistics, "Only 15 percent of highly-segregated
white schools have student bodies living in concentrated poverty.
Some 88 percent of highly-segregated minority schools have student
populations living in concentrated poverty." In addition to poverty,
segregation also occurs inside integrated schools as well. Because
of ability tracking, "You have Latino kids who go through their
entire school day without seeing a white kid, and you have white
kids who have almost no interaction with their Latino classmates,
and it is all done within the same school," says North Hollywood
High School teacher Randy Vail. Looking at these and other factors,
we must examine ways to identify segregation within today's schools
and make an active effort to combat against it in order for students
to learn to work together.
Subject Areas: Civics, Government, Citizenship, Debate, Math,
Language Arts
View the Lesson Plan online here
Download the full Lesson Plan here (PDF)
Background: Over the past ten years, the majority of U.S.
states have enacted some form of High Stakes Testing to evaluate
student performance. When President George Bush enacted the "No
Child Left Behind" legislation in January 2002, it changed the role
of the U.S. government in public schools. While the legislation
is aimed at creating better schools through increased funding and
raising student achievement, its primary focus is on the use of
standardized tests to evaluate results. The problem lies in the
quality of tests being administered. Each state is responsible for
designing their own testing program including setting standards
and developing test content, reporting results, and soon, showing
"adequate progress" toward meeting state standards each year. In
addition, the results of these tests are then compared with National
Assessment of Educational Progress standards to see if they are
rigorous enough. As a result of this legislation, many states are
now creating testing programs so rigorous that many students, some
of them extremely successful, cannot pass. In some states literally
thousands of students are repeating grades year after year because
they cannot pass the High Stakes Test established by the state.
Students who have successfully completed all the coursework necessary
to earn high school diplomas and enter college are kept from graduating
because of their inability to pass High Stakes Tests. In addition,
many of the tests do not take into account the needs of students
with disabilities. Nationally there have been a number of successful
lawsuits against the use of these tests, particularly when failure
to pass the exam results in students being unable to graduate. A
number of lawsuits against High Stakes Testing are currently pending
nationwide.
Subject Areas: Sociology, Philosophy, Psychology, Modern Problems, Language Arts,
and Debate
View the Lesson Plan online here
Download the full Lesson Plan here (PDF)
For additional lesson plans, see
Lesson Plans for Middle and High School Level Students
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