When No Child Left Behind was passed by President George W. Bush in 2001, it was said to be the bill that would get out American children up to standard in Math and English as the rest of the world.  Bush mandated that states implement some type of system for making sure that all students are on the same level in Math and English. While the president did not say exactly which methods of assessments states must use, most states chose to assess their students using yearly exams mainly in these two subject areas.  These yearly exams were promoted to the public as the perfect way to assess not only our students, but teachers and principals and schools around the US.

President G.W. Bush, NLCB Signing

In New York State, public schools do yearly exams in English and Math from the 3rd to 8th grade.  In high school, students need to pass at least 5 Regents Exams in basic subjects (Global History, US History, Math, Science and English).  Since its implementation, we have seen some major flaws with the process of examinations.  Some of the biggest problems are that the Regents Exams significantly alter the quality of the curriculum that students are getting in school.  Teachers tend to focus their teaching only on the information that will be on the exam and removes the room for creativity and intellectual student thought.  High school simply becomes a place where students are expected to navigate pre-determined information and pass these exams that demonstrate that their teacher and the school is “achieving”. Meanwhile, these are not necessarily skills that the students need to succeed once they get into college or in their everyday lives afterward.

There are some public schools in the New York that have worked to protest this high stakes testing system.  The New York Performance Standards Consortium works to instill values of critical thinking, social awareness/consciousness and peace & justice in its high school students.  Instead of taking yearly Regents and abiding to its strict curriculum restrictions, these students are not bound to only learn what is going to be on the test.  Instead of exams, students in consortium schools complete a research paper that they work on for a couple of months before they are due.  Teachers would help the students develop their theses, supporting arguments, and resources. Then, students are responsible for presenting and defending their papers to a panel of peers, teachers and outside evaluators at the end of year that they are graded on.

City-As-School High School PBATs Evaluations

This summer, Professor Hantzopoulos, Ziwen Wang and I worked to examine and document 11 schools that are being added into the Consortium, and working to transition their schools from traditional high stakes testing schools. Ziwen and I sat on several panels of students work as outside evaluators to help determine if their papers were up to consortium standards.   Ziwen and I were also responsible for tutoring some of these students and provide them with extra help on their papers.  Finally, we both assisted Professor Hantzopoulos with interviewing some of the principals of these schools to find out their initial reactions and intentions for the upcoming years. All of these components truly helped me to get an all-encompassing idea of how the Consortium works to support children and prepare them for college and speaking critically about their opinions.  I am excited to see more results of these schools transition to project based assessment once school resumes in the fall.

Here is a link to the consortium website for more information on their work against High Stakes Tests.

It has been a very busy few weeks for us in Chicago Hall (and beyond)! Our collaboration has focused on the history of German children’s culture, particularly toys and children’s books, one of Prof. Elliott Schreiber’s key research interests.  Throughout the summer, Kristen Caccavale has assisted Prof. Schreiber with research into the psychology of children’s play as depicted especially in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s famous children’s story, “Nutcracker and the King of Mice.”   This research will culminate in an article to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in Fall 2014.

Children’s culture also features heavily in Vassar’s year-long Beginning German sequence.  We started our summer with Kristen compiling a list of over 50 contemporary, award-winning German children’s books, which we have ordered for Vassar’s Thompson Memorial Library. We will be using these books in Beginning German to help students improve not only their understanding of the German language, but also of the German culture.  Students in this class write and illustrate their own children’s books and read them to elementary school children at Deutsche Schule New York, located about an hour south of Vassar in White Plains. We have been working with several staff members at Academic Computing Services in order to incorporate iBooks into this project, and we will now be piloting some of the iBooks software in class next year.   We also had a very productive trip to the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York during our fifth week. There, we had access to the museum’s extensive archives, where we were able to look at original editions of German pop-up books written by Lothar Meggendorfer, some of which were over 100 years old. We have ordered reproductions of these books to use in Beginning German, and they will make another excellent addition to the curriculum.

This scene is from the first page of the Lothar Meggendorfer pop-up book; it shows the mother and father being driven in a car on the right, and a maid on the left.

This scene takes place on the fourth page of the book and shows a little girl with her cat and a maid in the kitchen.

While at the Strong also discovered some extensively detailed books regarding German dolls and dollhouses, which Kristen will be using in her culminating Ford Scholar poster and presentation, as well as in a presentation she will be giving to students in Beginning German in the Fall. Kristen has decided to center her presentation on German girlhood in Imperial Germany, and has been reading several girls’ memoirs from that period, as well as researching German girls’ dolls, toys, dollhouses, and societal roles during this time.

The whole book laid out at the Strong National Museum of Play Archives.

In our last few weeks, we will be preparing for our October Ford Scholar poster presentation, as well as looking through the archives in Special Collections for any rare German children’s books or illustrations of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, which we will also be using to educate students in Beginning German about German art, literature, history, and culture. We can’t believe that our fellowship is almost over, but we have certainly made the most of it!

In the six weeks of our project, Professor Célérier and I set out to redesign her course called “What Does Francophone Comic Art Say?”.  The course will be taught in the spring of this coming school year and will be cross listed as French and Francophone Studies as well as Africana Studies.

First, we re-evaluated the former course syllabus and assessed each article and comic book on the assignment list in order to ensure that each assignment was relevant toward the goals of the course.  Then, after weeding out the less pertinent articles and comic books, we began our research for potential replacements that would better suit the curriculum.  Finally, we implemented the new articles and made further changes to the course schedule.  One of these changes was the assignment of a portfolio by each student due at the end of the course. The first part of this portfolio would showcase all of the written assignments completed by the student throughout the semester, demonstrating the student’s progress in the his/her French writing skills.  The other part of the portfolio would reveal the student’s process in crafting their own comic by showing each step of the creative procedure up to the final draft.  This final draft would then be turned into a poster which the student would orally present to the class during the last two weeks of class.

 All in all, this project was a significant learning experience for me because while I had the privilege to express my own opinions as a student in the redesign of this course, I had the opportunity to involve myself in the whole process and realize all of the work that goes into teaching such a course. I learned so much about the African Francophone culture, something that I had always wanted to study.  Thank you to everyone who has allowed me to have this wonderful research experience.  It has been a fruitful six weeks.

Samantha Prior ’14

Professor Robert Brigham – History Department

US Army soldiers coming down a street in Kismayo, Somalia.
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5177/5414662835_25e5ce0da7_o.jpg

In 2005 the concept that had been coined “Responsibility to Protect” or “R2P” was included in the outcome document from the UN World Summit and was formalized by the Security Council the following year. R2P seeks to reconcile the issues of state sovereignty and the prevention of mass atrocities, which are often seen as at odds with each other. At the core of R2P is the idea of “humanitarian intervention.” The three “pillars” of R2P are as follows:

1. The State carries the primary responsibility for protecting populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and their incitement.

2. The international community has a responsibility to encourage and assist States in fulfilling this responsibility.

3. The international community has a responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other means to protect populations from these crimes. If a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations, the international community must be prepared to take collective action to protect populations, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4039/4360446526_88f135a88a.jpg

The concept of R2P is often viewed as born of the series of mass atrocities that occurred throughout the 1990s, including (but not limited to) the crises in Somalia, the Balkans and Rwanda and the way the international community responded to (or did not respond to) them. As can be seen with recent examples such as Libya and Syria, this idea and the debate surrounding it is continually relevant in the world today.

The remains of victims of the Rwandan Genocide
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Rwandan_Genocide_Murambi_skulls.jpg

The case of the Rwandan Genocide is particularly compelling with regard to the development of these ideas due to the extreme nature of the violence and the astonishing lack of action on the part of important actors such as the United States and the United Nations. The project that I am working on in conjunction with Professor Brigham is researching the attitudes and actions of the Clinton Administration during the development of the genocide in Rwanda for a planned book on the topic.

This summer, I had the pleasure of working with Professor Lucy Johnson and three URSI students studying the archaeology of the Mid-Hudson Valley. In the field, we excavated at two prehistoric rock shelters on the Shawangunk Ridge: Peterskill Rock Shelter and Paint Mine Rock Shelter. There we found a wide variety of flakes and flake fragments, in addition to one perfectly formed, complete Late Archaic spear point. Given the large number and lithic artifacts and the dearth of pottery found at our sites, we speculate that these sites were used as temporary shelters for hunting parties on the ridge.

We also spent a few days excavating at two local historic archaeological sites: a burned-down hotel in Lake George, NY, and the buried kitchen garden of Matthew Vassar’s estate, Springside. Over the course of the summer, I had the opportunity to learn and apply the basic principles of archaeological excavation, including practicing how to keep accurate and detailed records, dig test pits, and interpret stratigraphy.

Along with working in the field, I helped Professor Johnson analyze and catalogue artifacts from the site of New Hampton in the Hudson Valley, and from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Professor Johnson and I catalogued and bagged a large set of bone tools from the Aleutian Islands which she had collected several years ago, and when that was completed, I sorted artifacts from the New Hampton site into flakes, flake fragments, core fragments, and stone tools, and then analyzed and catalogued their characteristics.

Through performing these analyses, and continuing to excavate in sites like Peterskill and Paint Mine (which have until now remained unstudied by modern academic archaeologists), we hope to better understand the prehistory of the Hudson Valley, a region which has not been excavated and studied nearly as much as it deserves to be.

Sean Keller, ’16

Over the past year, Professor Hantzopolous, along with four other researchers, have been analyzing the common categories used to describe and teach the “Modern Middle East’ in existing US world history textbooks. They examined how textbooks currently describe and frame the Middle East historically and identified five areas with gaps in instructional content. To promote a more sophisticated and complex understanding of the Middle East, the group is creating an alternative open-access curriculum for high school teachers that cover the following areas:  (1) Gender and Sexuality, (2) Arts and Technology, (3) Empire and Nation, (4) Social Movements, and (5) Plurality of Identities.

Professor Hantzopolus’ curriculum illuminates the ways in which peoples and societies also interacted in collaborative and fluid ways and offers students multiple perspectives, while asking them to be open and think critically.  This project is particularly important because of the current political milieu, when mainstream media that students are commonly exposed to often painfully erase or simplify complex histories and identities of this region, exacerbating difference and “otherness”.

My work consisted of researching and selecting primary resources and alternative materials for Professor Hantzopolous and the other researchers to use as they developed the new curriculum and to make the sources available to teachers using the curriculum. In the second half of our project, I assisted in reviewing and finalizing the curriculum. We have integrated information from diverse sources as well as new scholarship on the region, providing a nuanced approach that is accessible to different types of learners, while also providing teachers themselves with a strong curriculum which is robust in content, flexible, and meets many of the New York State and Common Core standards. The next step will be to disseminate the curriculum and will involve more outreach in high schools.

Working with Professor Islamaj in the Economics Department this summer involved researching the effects of financial integration (i.e., depth of linkage with international financial markets) on currency exchange rate depreciation.  After reviewing relevant microeconomic and macroeconomic literature, we explored the effect of exchange rate depreciations on consumption, investment, and prices in various countries.  Gathering country financial account and economic growth data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other databases, we used STATA, a data analysis and statistical software program, to write “do files” (lists of STATA commands and operations) and to perform regressions measuring key variables’ contributions to pass-through from exchange rate depreciations to prices.

This project is among the first to investigate the explicit effects of financial globalization on the transmission of exchange rate shocks  (i.e., events causing at least a 15% increase in the exchange rate) to prices within the affected country. Some factors that could trigger an exchange rate shock include major environmental disasters, unsustainable increases in national debt, global confidence crises, and wars  Our goal is to describe how a country’s lending or borrowing affects the relationship between such exchange rate shocks and prices.

We are distinguishing between net lender and net borrower countries to show the difference in investment behavior between two groups of countries (net creditor and net borrower nations) as a result of exchange rate depreciation. We hypothesize that exchange rate depreciation will negatively affect investment of net borrower countries relative to net lender countries, resulting in higher prices in net lender countries. Using 2SLS Arellano (2003) regressions for dynamic panels with lagged dependent variables and exogenous variables in a large T setting, our preliminary results (see table below) support our hypothesis. Most notably, net lender countries have a significantly larger inflation coefficient than net borrower countries.

Alexandra Deane and Quincy Mills

Professor Mills and I began the process of exploring the fundraising strategies of civil rights organizations and the significance of New York City as a critical site of resource mobilization, focusing specifically on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC, an organization born out of the lunch counter sit-in movements in early 1960, evolved into a group of students and organizers who sought to build power among black communities in the rural South. In addition to examining SNCC’s strategies of obtaining financial support, I also expanded my research to include archival collections at NYU’s Tamiment Library.

In order to better understand the sources of financial support on which SNCC relied to make their work possible, I combed through the group’s archival papers, which included letters written to and from SNCC staff, reports written by professional fundraisers hired by SNCC, financial reports that detailed the sources of major contributions, and office reports that illuminated the group’s strategic fundraising decisions. I focused primarily on the New York Friends of SNCC office, which was established for the sole purpose of fundraising and amassed the lion’s share of financial support for the organization. Here, multiple narratives emerged about the nature and significance of SNCC’s fundraising strategies.

Betty Garman in the SNCC Mississippi office in 1964.

SNCC relied on the contributions of sympathetic individuals and organizations. Staff established “Friends of SNCC” groups in the North for the sole purpose of fund-raising and developing programming that would simultaneously spread awareness about SNCC’s work and cultivate financial support to send to Southern offices. By keeping their fundraising base geographically separate from their organizing projects, SNCC staff were able to draw upon a larger base of Northern, white, liberal supporters who did not see SNCC’s often radical organizing work in the South as a challenge to their own power.  Thus, facilitated by SNCC’s efforts, the “friendship” between financial supporters in the North and organizers and activists in the South flourished.

Throughout these documents, a tension emerges between SNCC’s radicalism and the constraints of their financial support. This tension is perhaps most clear when SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael publicly embraced the Black Power rhetoric and stance that swept Southern black communities in 1966 and 1967. Responding to the rejection of whiteness (and especially white liberalism) that Black Power politics implied, many Northern supporters quickly voiced their condemnation of Carmichael and SNCC’s direction.

Professor Mills will continue to explore this theme of the tenuous relationship between sources of vital financial resources and the goals and ideals of SNCC, using the results of this project to continue research for his next book, which will look at the sources of financial support for the black freedom movement more broadly.

Urban Inequality

Tim Koechlin (International Studies and Urban Studies

Stephanie Osei-Sarpong (Vassar ’15, Education Major)

Our research this summer has focused on “urban inequality” – its meaning, its causes, and its implications.   This research will provide the foundation for an Urban Studies seminar that Professor Koechlin will teach in the Spring of 2014, “Advanced Debates in Urban Studies: Urban Inequality” (URBS 303).   It will also inform a paper that Professor Koechlin will present at the meetings of the American Social Sciences Association (ASSA) in Philadelphia in January, 2014.

The United States is the most unequal of the world’s rich countries and, over the past few decades, the US has become dramatically more unequal.  The US is also near the bottom of the list when it comes to economic and social mobility, despite its reputation as the “land of opportunity.”  This increasing economic inequality is reflected in and reinforced by unsettling levels of political, racial, gender, spatial, legal, educational, and environmental inequality – and more. Inequality begets inequality.   On a global scale, this story of interdependent inequalities is even more extreme and appalling.

As centers of political power and capital accumulation, cities have long been sites of socio-economic, spatial, racial and other forms of inequality.   The reproduction of inequality – in the US and elsewhere – happens, to a considerable extent, in cities and by urban processes.  URBS 303 is designed to allow (and force) students to explore the complicated, layered inequality that characterizes cities.   How is economic inequality linked – as cause and effect – to political, educational and spatial inequality?   How are these inequalities reflected in and reinforced by the built environment?  How is inequality within cities linked to globalization, and to neo-liberal policies in the US?   How can we intervene, to make our cities more equal and more “just”?  How can urban residents articulate and assert their “right to the city”?   And how do the answers to these questions vary from city to city?

Over several weeks, we gathered books, articles, data and images.   We studied them, we sorted them, and we discussed them.    We had long talks about pedagogy, and about the various means by which a teacher, student or scholar might “tell a story” about urban inequality.    And, finally, we drafted a very rich syllabus for URBS 303, and a promising outline for Professor Koechlin’s paper, “Urban Inequality, Neo-liberalism, and the Case for a Multidisciplinary Economics”…and we learned a lot along the way.