If you can tell a tree by the fruit it bears, it does not take long to visit various public schools in cities like Detroit to know that something is wrong with the fruit it produces. Something is wrong with the educational system, and very naturally something is wrong with its students' abilities to compete intellectually with their peers in more privileged school settings.
According to the four types of schools that Anyon describes, I feel as though I belong mostly to the "middle-class" school for each of my elementary and high school learning experiences. I wore a uniform from kindergarten through the end of high school, which just off of appearance alone, provided for a very meticulously structured setting. I attended charter schools for the most part, which differ from public schools, in that they have more concentrated and custom curricula. For example, in high school, I was able to earn college credit by taking courses administered by a university that charted the high school I attended. I was also able to take a series of modules designed by both my school and the Ford Motor Company for students who wished to pursue a business administration based curriculum during the four years. My high school had six to eight different course curricula, two of which were education and computer science.
I definitely had textbooks for each of my classes, and assessments, tests, quizzes and homework were all based off of lectures from teachers, as well as readings on a weekly basis. I always understood mathematical equations, for example, for having more than one answer, and I was always expected to logically choose the appropriate way to solve a problem, and I was left room for critical decision-making, as to how I solved it. In the social sciences, work was heavily based on the textbooks more so than other classes. I normally had study guide sheets with series of questions that could be answered after reading, where answers to the questions were carefully outlined in the texts. The same can be stated for the natural and physical sciences as well.
In reflection upon my elementary and high school experiences, I felt that I had a very unique learning experience because I had teachers that were very enlightened and dedicated instructors of their fields. It was not until I reached college, that I realized that I was cheated because I met students that I saw as competitors, who matriculated through obviously, much more privileged educational systems in middle to higher class suburbs across the United States. I would describe the teachers I had within these various schools to be hidden jewels. These small group of individuals, mainly stemming from my elementary and middle school years, motivated me to be well-read, articulate, diligent, and highly confident of my own intellectual capacity, and eager to see through to its further expansion. I was uniquely taught that as a young Black male, I always had to be "two steps ahead" of the next person to even be able to compete in the "real world".
Considering the fact that the educational systems here in the United States see through to providing thick walls between its socio-economic classes, it is safe to say that this roots from the United States' pluralistic feature. It is so extreme, that these differences can generally be seen and empirically categorized between whites and the wider range of minorities in the U.S. This is typically done by carefully looking at the typical levels of overall education, the incomes of families, and the types of professions that are pursued by these individuals upon completion of their educations. However, using race as a crutch in this today's world is becoming more and more pace. Through various technologies and globalization, the tide is being offered, but various tarnished educational systems across the U.S. are not producing enough intellectual surfers. With the assumption that little will change soon, the forecast of what is to come of people in the lower-middle classes, and below, in the United States is very intimidating. It is scary to smell so badly in the nostrils of a developed, information driven, and intelligent world; the kind of world, I can fortunately say, I have been most prepared for.
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