The Impact of Globalization on Urban Education - Essay Example

The Impact of Globalization on Urban Education Essay Introduction Globalization isa word that is known almost everywhere. It is a concept, a term with diverse definitions and implications. A definition that seems valuable in examining globalization and its connection to education is as follows: “a multidimensional set of social processes that create, multiply, stretch, and intensify worldwide social interdependence and exchanges while at the same time fostering in people a growing awareness of deepening connections between the local and the distant” (Gallagher et al., 2013, 129). Globalization is an old occurrence, basically speaking, yet the rapidity and scale to which global interactions and exchanges are occurring make this period different from previous types of globalization. So how do changes brought about by globalization influence urban schools? Such changes affect urban schools in a number of ways that teachers and students immediately and strongly experience. This essay discusses the effects of globalization on urban education. Globalizing Urban Education One of these effects is generated by the speed and convenience of Internet-driven interactions, which facilitate connections that were unknown in earlier times. Another effect is through the accessibility of scientific and technological data and knowledge that does not need actual, physical libraries. Students with an access to the Internet can look for and unearth knowledge or information that was not accessible before to students of the lower class (Lipman, 2004). Yet, counteracting these benefits are the disadvantages: globalization, including continuous economic problem and the outsourcing of communications and manufacturing jobs, has negatively affected the income base of numerous urban areas. Globalization has an effect on culture (Baronov, 2006). Some argue that globalization and the risk of homogenization or standardization is forcing local populations to oppose and thus reinforcing their local sentiments and identities, whether religious, cultural, or other forms of identity. Many are also anxious that the whole world population is taking on an American-type consumerism and advancing to full homogenization (Baronov, 2006). A middle standpoint, at times called ‘glocalization’, indicates that there is a cultural conflict, a push and pull, between cultural diversity and cultural homogenization. This conflict is repeated on a smaller extent in schools every time conflicts and rifts are seen over whose ethnic or cultural group asserts to be the superior one (Rizvi, 2007). Several schools follow the path of a more universal, common culture and some endorse diverse cultures or cultural differences, but only a handful of schools in fact try to facilitate a balance that considers both faces of the issue (Lipman, 2004). Transformative leaders of urban education have to require that students of urban public high schools in the U.S. have a certain extent of global cultural knowledge. They must have an accurate knowledge and appreciation of geography and a particular interaction with and connection to a given community in another country, as well as awareness of its leaders, folklores, demographics, economy, struggles, and history, and as a minimum a beginning competency or proficiency level in that community’s language (Cooper et al., 2014). For immigrant students, this could suggest acquiring academic awareness of their homeland and high literacy level in the mother tongue. Parts of this global cultural awareness could occur spontaneously through social interaction with different people, but it is the decision of the school leaders whether to make sure that instruction and curriculum are decisively oriented toward such competencies or skills. It is important to mention that the U.S. is one of the few countries where numerous educated individuals are proficient only in one language, or monolingual. All over the world, education is accompanied with being proficient in at least one more language (Rizvi, 2007). In 2001, the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) stresses language training as a key to economic and social involvement. In the CEFR report, plurilingualism is highlighted: “An individual’s experience of language and its cultural contexts expands from the language of the home to that of the society at large and then to the languages of other people (whether learnt at school or college or by direct experience)” (Gallagher et al., 2013, 130). Characterizations of language expertise are also changing as an outcome of growing and expanding global communication. While earlier descriptions of multilingualism stressed similar expertise in at least two languages, the CEFR paper and plurilingualism “suggest that speakers of second and third languages shouldn’t be compared to native speakers, but rather to highly competent non-native speakers” (Gallagher et al., 2013, 130). The fast progressing technologies facilitate global connections, making them less costly and more convenient and easier than before. Even though it could be financially impractical to think all high school graduates can travel abroad, students, with professional supervision and assistance, can fully exploit the technologies currently accessible to close the distance between them and their global peers. These technologies have usually been normal or ordinary among the children of the upper class, who go to private schools and highly subsidized public schools (Gallagher, 2013). In a fair and sufficient school environment, all students, irrespective of cultural background or social class, would benefit from these learning prospects. Hence, globalization revealed the need for leaders of urban education to foster in their schools community-based, local, and global cultural knowledge. Recently, American education has significantly stressed the local without regard for the global, especially in urban and poor areas. It is important nowadays to once more take into consideration the global (Cooper et al., 2014). An analysis of empirical studies that has explored the connection of education and globalization indicates that the politics of scale inside the political governing systems of urban educational governance, and the re-enlarging of the role of the state in educational governance can most appropriately be analyzed within the perspective of the growth of neoliberalism as a dominant policy framework in education program (Baronov, 2006). Starting from an argument that globalization has numerous definitions and implications, scholars recognize that it could be as much a philosophy as a reality. Nevertheless, although the specific kind of ‘globalization’ claimed by neoliberalism can be considered “an ideology that serves to justify policies serving particular interests but not others, the fact is that part of this account is based on real changes (and to be fair, real opportunities, at least for certain fortunate people” (Cooper et al., 2014, 422). Yet, have neoliberal ideas of governance, management, and reform been brought into the policy field, and if so, have they generated important reforms in outlooks on education totally different from previous beliefs about education “as a personalized, intimate and local process in which children and youth come of age in the context of acquiring and learning their family, regional and national culture” (Cooper et al., 2014, 422-3). Within the educational sector, there is a rising awareness that the neoliberal account of globalization, especially as carried out, is shown in an educational program that focuses on specific policies for assessment, instruction, curriculum, teacher training, standards, evaluation, and financing. Apple (2000) interprets this debate more widely as a ‘conservative restoration’ influenced by “a tense coalition of forces, some of whose aims partly contradicts others” (p. 49). Such coalition is made up of supporters of neoliberalism demanding reduced state power and expansion of market processes in education, and neoconservatives insisting enhancement of state homogenization of curriculum and other mechanisms (Gallagher, 2013). These demands require a critical practice of education governance or leadership rooted in a more profound knowledge of how to raise local reactions to safeguard public education against the arrival of total market processes to control educational transactions and other efforts that try to lessen state support and subsidy and to execute efficiency and management approaches derived from the business arena as a basis for educational policymaking and implementation (Apple, 2000). It is not possible to give any clear and logical study of urban education without taking into consideration the deep and intense social change that has taken place across urban areas in the face of global capitalism over the recent decades. The main issues posed by global capitalism, or globalization in general, for urban education nowadays are (Baronov, 2006, 12-13): rising levels of poverty; educational goals of Latino and Asian immigrant students with varied cultural backgrounds; consolidation of economic and political control in the suburban areas; authoritarian anti-crime strategies aimed at urban youth; decreasing economic prospects in urban areas; and rigid segregation of racial/ethnic groups. The effect of globalization anyhow, a misleading common agreement prevails among U.S. officials that the main challenges of urban education can be attributed to some micro-level circumstances (Baronov, 2006, 13): for example, teen violence, the drug malady, sexual promiscuity among adolescents, and broken or dysfunctional families. Consequently, majority of urban education restructurings attach little importance to the impact of globalization and stress policies that tackle shallow, obvious circumstances. Unluckily, according to Rizvi (2007), these policies have a tendency to be in line with the same market-driven, neoliberal ideas that create the ideological support for globalization. Conclusions Over the recent decades, processes of globalization have drastically re-created the whole socioeconomic landscape of the United States. Within this time, social inequality or the gap between the poor and the rich has broadened. Segregation of racial/ethnic minorities has intensified and a large number of manufacturing jobs have been lost, whereas the surviving jobs have relocated from urban areas to the suburbs. At present, increasing numbers of marginalized and poor racial/ethnic groups are packed in major cities. The effect of these occurrences on urban areas in the United States has been intense and severe and reveals main problems concerning policy alternatives for those struggling to enhance and reform urban education in accordance to changes brought about by globalization. References Apple, M. (2000). Official Knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age. New York: Routledge. Baronov, D. (2006). Globalization and Urban Education. Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice, 19(4), 12-17. Cooper, B., Cibulka, J., & Fusarelli, L. (2014). Handbook of Education Politics and Policy. London: Routledge. Gallagher, K. et al. (2013). Urban Education: A Model for Leadership and Policy. London: Routledge. Lipman, P. (2004). High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform. UK: Psychology Press. Rizvi, F. (2007). Postcolonialism and Globalization in Education. Cultural Studies, 7(3), 256-263. Read More