30. May 2009 by student.

   The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court justice is an excellent study of the balance between life chances and determination.  According to an article by Sharon Theimer with the Associated Press, Judge Sotomayor was born with poor life chances given her ethnicity, gender, and economic status.  In a speech entitled “A Latina Judge’s Voice”, she described herself as a “Newyorkrican” which she defined as “a born and bred New Yorker of Puerto Rican-born parents who came to the states during World War II”.  The White House, media, and her own speeches have emphasized her rags-to-riches rise fulfilling the “American Dream” against the odds.  She is proud of her Puerto Rican roots, but does not necessarily like others to call attention to it.  She was born in a South Bronx housing project into a blue collar family.  Intragenerational mobility was evident as she spent most of her youth in a middle class neighborhood attending private schools, going on to Princeton and Yale.  After law school, she moved up the ladder in Washington becoming part of the wealthy power elite.  She now earns over two hundred thousand dollars a year and lives in a million-dollar plus community.  Her brother is a physician in New York whose practice does not accept Medicaid or Medicare.  This debate for Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation will be intensive as it involves the highly charged aspects of ethnicity, sexism, tax brackets, racism, and the power elite.  She has nearly framed the argument by her own comments of being “more qualified as a judge (female, Hispanic) than a white male”(paraphrased from a speech in 2001).  Her rise in this country to such a powerful level from hard work and determination is a testament to the American Dream, but will certainly be highly scrutinized. 

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30. May 2009 by student.

   The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) results are due to come out to students this week across the state.  Many families wait nervously as their children’s promotion to the next grade depends on their test results.  Children as young as eight and nine years old feel tremendous amounts of test anxiety, stress, and burn-out as teachers push their own achievement pressures on to their students.  The FCAT was designed in 1971 to assess academic strengths and weaknesses, particularly in the basic skills.  Its manifest function was to implement a workable system of accountability for the public schools.  The students’ results from the FCAT are used to grade individual schools.  There is a direct relationship between financial funding and the school’s grade.  Although since its inception scores have risen,  the latent effects of stress, pressure, and stigma to the schools is becoming more evident.  Early objections to the FCAT have ranged from challenges to administrative procedures (Bradey v. State of Florida, 1979) to objections of stigmatizing entire schools (Debra P. v. Turlington, 1982).  More recent criticism centers on the over-emphasis of FCAT scores, teaching to the test, and funding being directed away from the very schools that need it most.  Although test scores can be diagnostically useful, they should not be used to drive the curriculum.

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