Gravitational Force Grade 3

[Lorin Cupples]

Whenmy daughter was about 6 months old, I discovered a little trick to make her laugh. If I tossed her in the air just a few inches, she got adorably happy. As she ascended, she grinned from ear to ear. Then, there was a moment when she felt the transition from rise to fall. She instantly panicked. Suddenly, I caught her from the sky. She let out a hearty giggle, knowing that she was safe in my arms. She knew, in her own way, that she had just done the impossible: She had just defied gravity.

The politics of our education system have indeed been raging. My home state of Tennessee is on the verge of experiencing partisan school board elections in some of its school districts for the first time in modern history (Aldrich, 2022). The Virginia gubernatorial election was decided, to some degree, by a political crusade against the idea of critical race theory (Beauchamp, 2021). Speaking of critical race theory, many state legislatures have a bill at some stage in the legislative process aiming to ban it from being taught in public schools (Schwartz, 2021). More than a dozen of these bills have become state law. Thousands of teachers now face the prospect of being fired should the content of their classroom instruction be deemed guilty of making kids feel uncomfortable or ashamed because of their race. All these political actions distract from the most pressing problems facing our public education system. This is what I mean by the gravitational pull.

The demonizing of any discussion of racial privilege in the most recent politicization of education means that our politics have become a force that augments advantage. What do I mean? Evidence shows that during the COVID-19 pandemic, public school students suffered massive degrees of learning loss. Students were receiving only a fraction of the instruction during the pandemic that they had received before (Engzell, Frey, & Verhagen, 2021). A study by McKinsey & Company estimates that the average impact on mathematics is about five months of learning loss (Dorn et al., 2021). That average creeps up to an average of six months for children enrolled in majority-Black schools. As a result of COVID-19 learning loss, experts have placed some of our children on a trajectory to earn less as adults, and the racial and economic earning and wage gaps are likely to worsen. A major educational crisis, with the power to drastically increase inequity, is staring us right in the face. Yet, our public discourse is ignoring it.

Instead, our public discussions are steeped in racial animus and self-interest, which weighs down our kids. Unfortunately, this situation is not new. During the Jim Crow era in the U.S. South, we had the White Citizens Council, whose ideology was white supremacy and whose main political objectives were preventing Black Americans from voting and attending schools with white children. In fact, council leaders typically made sure that any Black citizen who registered to vote or signed a petition to desegregate the schools had their name displayed in the local newspaper. This publishing signaled to fellow white residents which Black citizens should be fired, have their property destroyed, or even be killed.

An example: California voters passed a public referendum in 1998 called Ballot Proposition 227, which mandated that all K-12 instruction be conducted in English. This was a political project that outlawed English-Spanish multilingual learning. During the campaign, supporters, including an organization called English for the Children, spread false attacks and misinformation about the effects of bilingual instruction; raising fears among California residents over the potential effects of empowering Latinx kids who speak Spanish (Kinney, 2018).

This political strategy is an agreement that has been preserved by any means necessary. It led to the swinging of bats and sticks on school grounds in Boston (Gellerman, 2014) and the torching of empty school buses in Louisville (Quick & Damante, 2016). It motivated the violent harassing of little Black children throughout the South, where Ruby Bridges infamously had to be escorted to the doors of an all-white school by the collective shield of the U.S. National Guard. The violence. The carnage. The rage. These were the outcomes of our education politics at its darkest period. This is the force of the gravitational pull.

Fast forward to today, and the parallels are clear. Violence is erupting at school board meetings across the country over mask mandates, book selections, and critical race theory. Meanwhile, as was the case before, the political division and vitriol are distracting us from ensuring that our most vulnerable children are getting needed academic support. There continues to be more political organizing around preserving the power of whiteness than around helping our students become scientists, engineers, or the next generation of activists who could find solutions to our most pressing societal problems.

The solution to this moment is a politics of solutions. We need a public recommitment to mass political organizing around solving our most pressing problems. We need to collectively refocus on addressing the effects of learning loss. We need to renew the quest to reduce classroom sizes and provide wraparound social and mental health services. We need to do all the things that make schools capable of being the cornerstones of community empowerment and improvement.

The gravitational pull of politics extends beyond education. It pulls poor and/or Black and brown folks into not just failing schools but also jail cells, inadequate health facilities, overpoliced communities, and communities without access to clean water. Those of us committed to education must believe policy can help us push back. We must believe that, together, we can catch our kids being pulled down by politics. We must believe that we can defy gravity and do the impossible.

Jonathan E. Collins is an assistant professor of political science and education and the associate director of the Columbia University Center for Educational Equity, both at the Teachers College, Columbia University, NY.

Phi Delta Kappan, a publication of PDK International, offers timely, relevant, and provocative insights on K-12 education policy, research, curriculum, and professional development. Kappan readers include new and veteran teachers, graduate students, school and district administrators, university faculty members (researchers and teacher educators), and policy makers.

A force is a push or pull acting upon an object as a result of its interaction with another object. There are a variety of types of forces. Previously in this lesson, a variety of force types were placed into two broad category headings on the basis of whether the force resulted from the contact or non-contact of the two interacting objects.

These types of individual forces will now be discussed in more detail. To read about each force listed above, continue scrolling through this page. Or to read about an individual force, click on its name from the list below.

An applied force is a force that is applied to an object by a person or another object. If a person is pushing a desk across the room, then there is an applied force acting upon the object. The applied force is the force exerted on the desk by the person.

The force of gravity is the force with which the earth, moon, or other massively large object attracts another object towards itself. By definition, this is the weight of the object. All objects upon earth experience a force of gravity that is directed "downward" towards the center of the earth. The force of gravity on earth is always equal to the weight of the object as found by the equation:

The normal force is the support force exerted upon an object that is in contact with another stable object. For example, if a book is resting upon a surface, then the surface is exerting an upward force upon the book in order to support the weight of the book. On occasions, a normal force is exerted horizontally between two objects that are in contact with each other. For instance, if a person leans against a wall, the wall pushes horizontally on the person.

The friction force is the force exerted by a surface as an object moves across it or makes an effort to move across it. There are at least two types of friction force - sliding and static friction. Though it is not always the case, the friction force often opposes the motion of an object. For example, if a book slides across the surface of a desk, then the desk exerts a friction force in the opposite direction of its motion. Friction results from the two surfaces being pressed together closely, causing intermolecular attractive forces between molecules of different surfaces. As such, friction depends upon the nature of the two surfaces and upon the degree to which they are pressed together. The maximum amount of friction force that a surface can exert upon an object can be calculated using the formula below:

The air resistance is a special type of frictional force that acts upon objects as they travel through the air. The force of air resistance is often observed to oppose the motion of an object. This force will frequently be neglected due to its negligible magnitude (and due to the fact that it is mathematically difficult to predict its value). It is most noticeable for objects that travel at high speeds (e.g., a skydiver or a downhill skier) or for objects with large surface areas. Air resistance will be discussed in more detail in Lesson 3.

The tension force is the force that is transmitted through a string, rope, cable or wire when it is pulled tight by forces acting from opposite ends. The tension force is directed along the length of the wire and pulls equally on the objects on the opposite ends of the wire.

The spring force is the force exerted by a compressed or stretched spring upon any object that is attached to it. An object that compresses or stretches a spring is always acted upon by a force that restores the object to its rest or equilibrium position. For most springs (specifically, for those that are said to obey "Hooke's Law"), the magnitude of the force is directly proportional to the amount of stretch or compression of the spring.

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