Name: Entering 9th Grade Summer Reading Assignment Welcome, New 9th Graders! Your summer assignment is to read The Other Wes Moore and write an analysis paragraph in response to it. You must also complete the planning pages that begin on page 11. This must all be done before Prep Academy Before you read the novel, please read the following articles and fiction pieces to help give you background on issues that the book discusses. To help guide your thinking, here is the prompt for the writing assignment: Writing Prompt Instructions Write an analytical paragraph in which you respond to the following prompt: Which do you think is more influential in determining outcomes in life: the choices individuals make or the privileges and pressures society puts on them? REQUIREMENTS: 1. Your paragraph must be 6-10 sentences. 2. Include a THESIS STATEMENT that responds to the prompt choosing a side. 3. Include at least one piece of EVIDENCE from Wes Moore text to support your response 4. EXPLAIN fully HOW your evidence supports your argument. 5. Include at least one piece of EVIDENCE from the news articles to support your response 6. EXPLAIN fully HOW your evidence supports your argument. 7. Make a CONNECTION to your own life, where you use an example from your own life to prove your argument 8. Be written following the conventions of standard written English. PROOF READ! 1 Name ___________________ At Harvesttime By Maya Angelou There is an immutable1 life principle with which many people will quarrel2. Although nature has proven season in and season out that if the thing that is planted bears3 at all, it will yield4 more of itself, there are those who seem certain that if they plant tomato seeds, at harvesttime they can reap5 onions. Too many times for comfort I have expected to reap good when I know I have sown6 evil. My lame excuse is that I have not always known that actions can only reproduce themselves, or rather, I have not always allowed myself to be aware of that knowledge. Now, after years of observation and enough courage to admit what I have observed, I try to plant peace if I do not want discord7; to plant loyalty and honesty if I want to avoid betrayal & lies. Of course, there is no absolute assurance that those things I plant will always fall upon arable8 land will take root & grow, nor can I know if another cultivator did not leave contrary seeds before I arrived. I do know, however, that if I leave little to chance, if I am careful about the kinds of seeds I plant, about their potency and nature, I can, within reason, trust my expectations. 1 Unchangeable Argue 3 Results in 4 Produce 5 Gather/harvest 6 Past tense of “sow,” meaning to plant 7 Conflict 8 Farmable 2 2 It’s the opportunity gap! Unit 1 Text #2 The evidence is overwhelming: Poverty is what produces the achievement gap. So why do we ignore it? BY PRUDENCE CARTER , KEVIN WELNER NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, May 13, 2013, 4:05 AM Harlem Success Academy works hard to combat poverty — and get kids achieving at the same levels as their higher-income peers. The authors suggest this process is far more difficult than reformers believe it to be. Parents in New York City who compete for coveted slots in the most sought-after preschools and kindergartens are often met with ridicule. But what these parents are doing is logical. They recognize something that many leaders — including Mayor Bloomberg — have largely ignored for years: Children learn when they have opportunities to learn, and the richer those opportunities from the very earliest age, the greater the learning. If you want the right outcome, you need the right inputs. By the time young children enter kindergarten, education researchers already see a fully developed test-score gap. The children at the top are those most advantaged by their parents’ wealth, having begun their academic development at very early ages. They board an elevator that speeds them to academic success. Children in middle-class families benefit from some of these resources, but their parents must struggle to try to keep up. Effectively, their parents are able to put them on smoothly operating escalators toward academic attainment goals; but theirs is no express elevator. Meanwhile, children who are born into poor or lower-income families face enormous disadvantages. They stare up at a steep stairwell, often with broken steps and no hand rails. Although their test scores have increased some over two decades, the relative gap between them and the other groups is still startling high. Nearly two-thirds of black and Latino youth under the age of 18 fall into this group, and, though there are, of course, many exceptions, their talent is being wasted year after year, generation after generation. This all leads to the predictable, oft-lamented achievement gap — which is powerfully present in New York City, home of some of the richest and some of the poorest people in America, along with plenty in between. 3 Lower-income children perform less well on high-stakes accountability tests; they then graduate from high school and attend college at significantly lower rates than children of the wealthy and the middle class. Achievement and opportunity are intricately connected. Without one, you cannot have the other. Politicians have responded to the markedly different educational outcomes among different groups by raising expectations and demands through high-stakes accountability systems. This is exactly the wrong response. The No Child Left Behind law, New York’s new teacher evaluation law and other policies implicitly, if not explicitly, insist that all three of these groups of children can reach the metaphorical top floor. “No excuses,” they insist. The Common Core standards, while sound, are an articulation of this same basic idea. What is still missing, years after the education reform movement began, is sufficient supports, capacity or resources — at the earliest age, which is when assistance is most critical — to close the initial and enduring opportunity gap. The undeniable fact of life in America, indeed the world, is that higher-income families are fortunate to have the resources to supplement their children’s education with arts, science, history and engaging, expansive learning. Children in lower-income families are usually denied such opportunities. And as their schools become more test-focused, they have few places to turn for this sort of vital enrichment. The New York City parents mentioned at the outset — and parents throughout the United States — know the truth: Policymakers cheat our children when they seek out magic beans and silver bullets instead of the quieter but much more meaningful investments in the sort of deeply engaging teaching and learning that will produce vibrant, intellectually curious young people in all communities. If we as a nation hope to narrow glaring achievement gaps among children of different social classes, we must step up to provide low-income youth with a fair start. We need to think much more seriously about the inputs. Every American will not go to college. But all our children should be given an equitable chance to be prepared for college. For those now facing the steep stairwell, our leaders have a choice. They can continue the breathless push for achievement now, regardless of where kids start. Or they can turn to solid research about opportunities to learn. They can increase access to high-quality preschools, welltrained and culturally sensitive teachers, childhood nutrition, learning enrichment programs and other inputs. We know how and why some students thrive while others falter. It’s the opportunity gap, and we can close it. Carter is professor of education and sociology at Stanford University, and Welner is professor of education policy at the University of Colorado-Boulder. They are the co-editors of “Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give All Children an Even Chance.” The New Jim Crow: Unit 1 Text #3 4 How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste By Michelle Alexander Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America. Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land. Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America. Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative: *There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. *As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race. * A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers. *If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public 5 benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era. Excuses for the Lockdown There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We’re told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades -- they are currently at historical lows -- but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population. The drug war has been brutal -- complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods -- but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drugrelated visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts. That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison. This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That’s why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it’s all about violent crime. Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the 6 words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it. The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes -- sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries. Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton’s boastful words, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.” The facts bear him out. Clinton’s “tough on crime” policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the “New Democrats” championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal, if you’ve been labeled a felon. Facing Facts But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn’t the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that’s where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no. The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market. The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s -- the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war -- nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as 7 prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city. In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time -- a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for. Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers -- not to mention president of the United States -- causes us all to marvel at what a long way we’ve come. Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that’s with affirmative action! When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our “colorblind” society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure -- the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate. This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare. Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010). The former director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU in Northern California, she also served as a law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court. Currently, she holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. To listen to a TomCast audio interview in which Alexander explains how she came to realize that this country was bringing Jim Crow into the Age of Obama, click here. 8 Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline Unit 1 Text #4 “Every man in my family has been locked up. Most days I feel like it doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I try—that’s my fate, too.” —11th-grade African American student, Berkeley, Calif. This young man isn’t being cynical or melodramatic; he’s articulating a terrifying reality for many of the children and youth sitting in our classrooms—a reality that is often invisible or misunderstood. Some have seen the growing numbers of security guards and police in our schools as unfortunate but necessary responses to the behavior of children from poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods. But what if something more ominous is happening? What if many of our students—particularly our African American, Latina/o, Native American, and Southeast Asian children—are being channeled toward prison and a lifetime of second-class status? We believe that this is the case, and there is ample evidence to support that claim. What has come to be called the “school-to-prison pipeline” is turning too many schools into pathways to incarceration rather than opportunity. This trend has extraordinary implications for teachers and education activists. It affects everything from what we teach to how we build community in our classrooms, how we deal with conflicts with and among our students, how we build coalitions, and what demands we see as central to the fight for social justice education. What Is the School-to-Prison Pipeline? The school-to-prison pipeline begins in deep social and economic inequalities, and has taken root in the historic shortcomings of schooling in this country. The civil and human rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s spurred an effort to “rethink schools” to make them responsive to the needs of all students, their families, and communities. This rethinking included collaborative learning environments, multicultural curriculum, student-centered, experiential pedagogy—we were aiming for education as liberation. The back-to-basics backlash against that struggle has been more rigid enforcement of ever more alienating curriculum. The “zero tolerance” policies that today are the most extreme form of this punishment paradigm were originally written for the war on drugs in the early 1980s, and later applied to schools. As Annette Fuentes explains, the resulting extraordinary rates of suspension and expulsion are linked nationally to increasing police presence, checkpoints, and surveillance inside schools. As police have set up shop in schools across the country, the definition of what is a crime as opposed to a teachable moment has changed in extraordinary ways. In one middle school we’re familiar with, a teacher routinely allowed her students to take single pieces of candy from a big container she kept on her desk. One day, several girls grabbed handfuls. The teacher promptly sent them to the police officer assigned to the school. What formerly would have been an opportunity to have a conversation about a minor transgression instead became a law enforcement issue. 9 Children are being branded as criminals at ever-younger ages. Zero Tolerance in Philadelphia, a recent report by Youth United for Change and the Advancement Project, offers an example: Robert was an 11-year-old in 5th grade who, in his rush to get to school on time, put on a dirty pair of pants from the laundry basket. He did not notice that his Boy Scout pocketknife was in one of the pockets until he got to school. He also did not notice that it fell out when he was running in gym class. When the teacher found it and asked whom it belonged to, Robert volunteered that it was his, only to find himself in police custody minutes later. He was arrested, suspended, and transferred to a disciplinary school. Early contact with police in schools often sets students on a path of alienation, suspension, expulsion, and arrests. George Galvis, an Oakland, Calif., prison activist and youth organizer, described his first experience with police at his school: “I was 11. There was a fight and I got called to the office. The cop punched me in the face. I looked at my principal and he was just standing there, not saying anything. That totally broke my trust in school as a place that was safe for me.” Galvis added: “The more police there are in the school, walking the halls and looking at surveillance tapes, the more what constitutes a crime escalates. And what is seen as ‘how kids act’ vs. criminal behavior has a lot to do with race. I always think about the fistfights that break out between fraternities at the Cal campus, and how those fights are seen as opposed to what the police see as gang-related fights, even if the behavior is the same.” Mass Incarceration: A Civil Rights Crisis The growth of the school-to-prison pipeline is part of a larger crisis. Since 1970, the U.S. prison population has exploded from about 325,000 people to more than 2 million today. According to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, this is a phenomenon that cannot be explained by crime rates or drug use. According to Human Rights Watch (Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs, 2000) although whites are more likely to violate drug laws than people of color, in some states black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates 20 to 50 times greater than those of white men. Latina/os, Native Americans, and other people of color are also imprisoned at rates far higher than their representation in the population. Once released, former prisoners are caught in a web of laws and regulations that make it difficult or impossible to secure jobs, education, housing, and public assistance—and often to vote or serve on juries. Alexander calls this permanent second-class citizenship a new form of segregation. 10 Writing Prompt Instructions Write an analytical paragraph in which you respond to the following prompt: Which do you think is more influential in determining outcomes in life: the choices individuals make or the privileges and pressures society puts on them? REQUIREMENTS: 9. Your paragraph must be 6-10 sentences. 10. Include a THESIS STATEMENT that responds to the prompt choosing a side. 11. Include at least 1 piece of EVIDENCE from Wes Moore text to support your response 12. EXPLAIN fully HOW your evidence supports your argument. 13. Include at least one piece of EVIDENCE from the news articles to support your response 14. EXPLAIN fully HOW your evidence supports your argument. 15. Make a CONNECTION to your own life, where you use an example from your own life to prove your argument 16. Be written following the conventions of standard written English. PROOFREAD! Organization of an Analytical Paragraph What is an analytical paragraph? 6-10 sentences (quality not quantity) Includes thesis, evidence, explanation, and connections Using texts for evidence Make an argument in response to a prompt 1) Thesis 1. Responds to the prompt: directly and no unrelated points 2. Choose a side: do not stay in the middle 3. Debatable: no obvious answer, able to argue about it 4. Supportable: can find evidence 5. Specific: avoid vague or cliché statements 2) Evidence (X2) * Use an example from the texts (1 from book & 1 from article) that supports your argument * introduces the example stating where it comes from 11 3) Explain (X2) * clearly and specifically explain HOW your evidence proves your argument 4) Connection * EXPLAIN a text-to-self connection (example from your own life) that supports your own argument What are some 1) always be specific (no vague language) habits of great 2) persuade the reader (prove your argument) analytical writers? 3) PROOFREAD: (check for organization, accuracy, grammar) 12 Planning Your Writing! Use the flow chart below to plan each part of your writing. 1. Respond to the prompt by choosing a side and stating your rationale. _________________________________ is more influential in determining school outcomes because ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ _________ 4. Brainstorm possible evidence from the news articles to support your point. A. _______________________________ B. _______________________________ C. _______________________________ 5. Pick your best piece of evidence from above. Explain specifically and clearly how it proves your point. ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ 2. Brainstorm possible evidence from The Other Wes Moore to support your point. A. _______________________________ B. _______________________________ C. _______________________________ 3. Pick your best piece of evidence from above. Explain specifically and clearly how it proves your point. ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ 6. Think of an experience from your own life that you could use as an example to prove your argument. Explain clearly and specifically. ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ _________ 13 EXAMPLE A Both the individual and society are important influencers on life outcomes because of choices and privileges and pressures that we all have in life. Other Moore chose to sell drugs and Author More did not. I think that Author Moore made good choices in his life but Other Moore definitely did not. Also, children from low income communities do not have good educational opportunities, so it’s hard for them to learn and they fall behind. This connects to my life because school is hard and my teachers are annoying :P EXAMPLE B Society is more influential in determining life outcomes because the educational and economic pressures on low-income people make it extra challenging to be successful. In the memoir “The Other Wes Moore” by Wes Moore, Other Moore was raised in a low-income community with very little supports or opportunities and plenty of negative reinforcement. For example, his brother Tony was involved in the drug trade, and even though Tony encouraged him not to join, the example Tony set for Wes helped to lead him into the drug trade himself since he had little opportunity for other ways to be successful. This example shows that although Wes made decisions for himself, his choices were extremely limited by the pressures of society around him. In addition, Michelle Alexander’s article “The New Jim Crow” explains how African-American men have been the focus of police in the War on Drugs, even though white and black communities use drugs at approximately the same rates. This focus on African-Americans in the Drug War has led to a system of mass incarceration where almost 50% of African-American men are in the prison or parole system, which dramatically limits their opportunities in life. The New Jim Crow system creates extreme pressures on low income people of color, which severely limits their potential to be successful in life and shows that society plays a huge role in determining life outcomes. In my own childhood, I saw how police rarely focused their drug enforcement efforts on people in the high-income community where I was raised, even though many of my peers in school used and/or sold drugs. This shows that children in high income communities have more chances for success because of the privileges in their life. 14 FINAL DRAFT _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ 15 _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ 16 17
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