The Statistics

"By 4th grade, Black and Latino students are on average nearly 3 years behind their White and Asian students."

This statistic leaves me mostly with questions. The first one is obvious - why? Why is this happening? When I start thinking about it, my mind gets all tangled and disorderly because the problem is so huge. What is happening in America that entire groups of people are not achieving on the same level as other groups of people? As a teacher on the Lower East Side, I wanted to presented these statistics to my students to get their minds turning and tangled into similar knots. However, I didn't fully anticipate the trouble some students might have with reading statistics or putting all of this information together. What might be a better way to make these statistics clearer and to help students feel their impact?

One thing that I realize is that when these statistics were presented to me, they were presented one at a time as a Powerpoint presentation. I had time to digest each one. Maybe presenting the list to students was too overwhelming? Or maybe not. Maybe I just need to give students time to write and process what they are thinking. We'll see once they start blogging tomorrow!