Tracy,
Thanks for this. Sometimes I feel like John the Baptist, just screaming in the wilderness. No one wants to know the truth. No one wants to admit there's a monumental problem swiftly moving towards the point of no return. How many times have I heard, "we know there's a problem, let's talk about solutions?" I've heard too many programs involving giving away material items just to get the folks to come to school on the first day. Sadness. I've seen too many children with expensive clothes, shoes, and even jewelry and heard their parents tell me that they can't afford tutors, books, etc.. I've gotten in so much trouble on teaching jobs by telling students that their A's meant nothing when compared to the A's of children at high schools who were performing near some kind of line of success. Getting in trouble for telling the truth? I'm sick of it. I've stopped.
Thanks again.
La Vonda
On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Tracy Flemming <cafenegritude@gmail.com> wrote:
POVERTY AND FAILURE OF EDUCATION SYSTEM WEIGH ON BLACK STUDENTS
By MIKE SECCOMBE
Prof. Henry Louis Gates: "What happened to our people?" Since 1968,
the black middle class in America has quadrupled, Henry Louis (Skip)
Gates told a packed house at the Edgartown Whaling Church on Thursday
evening.
But that was the only positive news in an otherwise bleak survey of
the state of black education by a panel of experts convened by
Professor Gates and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and
African American Research.
Henry Louis Gates and panelists discuss Separate But Unequal: Closing
the Education Gap
Professor Gates referred to that growth in the middle class only to
make a point of contrast: That over the same period of time, the
number of black children living at or below the poverty line had
remained the same, about 35 per cent.
The topic for the night was Separate but Unequal: Closing the
Education Gap, but the talk addressed a whole lot more "gaps" than
just education, including the developmental gap, the cultural gap, the
punishment gap, the political gap, and, above all, the economic gap.
While the focus was on African American attainment, the implications
of what was said reached far wider, touching on the achievement gaps
affecting other minority groups and impoverished whites and to the
future of the nation as a whole.
Unless things improved dramatically, one panelist pointed out late in
proceedings, America was looking at a near future where half the
population had at best eighth-grade levels of competency.
Professor Gates started things off with a depressing statistic. A
recent College Board report had found "one in two men of color, aged
15 to 24 who graduate from high school, is going to end up unemployed,
incarcerated, or dead."
"And that's among those who graduate," he said. "What about those who
drop out? What are their chances at subsistence, a meaningful, decent
life. What happened to our people?"
He recalled that when he was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, "the
blackest thing you could be was an educated man or woman, not an
entertainer or an athlete."
Black people, he said, had valued education "stealing a little
knowledge," he called it since the days of slavery. Teachers once had
an "almost godlike" status in the black community, and public schools
were "sanctuaries and communal sites of hope and aspiration."
But now, with the school system falling apart, the educational
progress which had lifted people like him had stalled. He called for
"the equivalent of a new civil rights movement" to confront the
failings of the educational system.
"Dr. King did not die so a small percentage of us could make it while
the larger percentage remained mired in a cycle of poverty," he said,
before turning the discussion over to the panel to first analyze the
problem, and then offer some solutions.
The first panelist called upon by the moderator, Chalayne Hunter-
Gault, was Angel Harris, an Associate Professor of Sociology and
African America Studies at Princeton, who quantified the educational
gap.
On average, he said, black and latino students were graduating high
school "with the same skill set that whites had in the eighth grade."
And while from the 1960s to 2000 there was a slight narrowing of the
attainment gap, it was so slight that it would take 60 years in
reading and 100 in math to achieve equality.
The unrealistic goal of closing those gaps by 2014, set by the No
Child Left Behind policy, of President George W. Bush, he said,
indicated a "lack of respect for the problem."
The No Child Left Behind policy, with its emphasis on standardized
tests and a regimen of punitive measures for schools which did not
measure up, was almost universally condemned by the panelists.
Diane Ravitch. The second panelist, Diane Ravich, Research Professor
of Education at New York University and a senior figure in education
under both the first President Bush and President Clinton, at one
stage called it "the most ridiculous piece of legislation ever passed
by Congress."
It used testing as punishment, she said, threatening to humiliate and
fire educators who did not meet its "impossible" standards of annual
improvement in "invalid" testing.
The initiative had failed even by its own standards; this year 82
percent of schools would fail.
The major reason for poor educational outcomes, in America or anywhere
else in the world, was poverty, she said. She offered evidence too.
For all the publicity about American students comparing poorly to
those in other developed countries, this was not uniformly true. "In
fact, in low-poverty schools in the U.S. the test scores were higher
than in [world leaders] Finland, Japan and Korea," she said. Where the
schools had 25 per cent poverty, the test scores were equivalent to
those countries. The real reason for America's lower overall results
was that "we lead the world in child poverty."
That poverty had become more concentrated as black, middle class
families left inner cities and as the manufacturing base of cities had
declined. On top of that was the "dramatic crisis of incarceration.
The black incarceration rate is eight times the white incarceration
rate," she said.
Professor Ravich quoted Harvard sociologist Bruce Weston, saying that
American society made a decision in the 1960s. It could have addressed
the yawning social gap between the races, but instead chose to build
prisons.
James Comer. James Comer, Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale
School of Medicine, countered by saying it was more complex than
blaming poverty alone. He was a child of poverty, with a mother who
had less than 2 years of school, and a father who was a laborer with a
sixth grade education.
The difference between him and so any other poor kids, was "the
quality of the developmental experience that I received at home that
they did not receive," he said.
He also stated that despite the "exclusion and abuse" of African
Americans in the past, there was at least a measure of employment
security. But starting in the 1950s, the number of low-skill jobs for
the poorly-educated had declined. As a result the number of
dysfunctional families had risen. The number of children born into
dysfunctional families had risen even faster. The evidence showed that
functional families had fewer children, while the most dysfunctional
often had five or more.
"In three generations, what you had was an explosion of the
dysfunctional families" he said. This meant more children reaching
school age who were underdeveloped in the skills they needed to cope.
Michelle Rhee The fourth panelist, Michelle Rhee, drew on her
experience as chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public school system
between 2007 and 2010, to talk about the practicalities of dealing
with a failing system.
When she took her job in Washington, she said, it was generally known
to have the worst-performing schools in the nation. She gave some
examples of what she encountered: Having heard "countless stories" of
children without text books, she found the system did have them, but
they had not been delivered; hundreds of teachers went months at a
time without being paid; one teacher had paid for 18 months for health
care, then when his wife went to the emergency room he found out the
system had not signed him up for it; she decided to buy 6000 computers
for all the school classrooms only to learn most school wiring systems
could not cope with them.
Among the changes she did make were instituting breakfast programs in
addition to lunch programs — and later even supper programs for
children who were not being fed at home. She also put nurses in every
one of 123 schools, and established access to art, music, PE,
librarians and social workers or guidance counselors.
She condemned the influence of politics, recalling a meeting with a
group of politicians to discuss closing 23 schools and having one
confide that he thought the measure was necessary and inviting her to
"close as many as you want to as long as none is in my ward."
Ms. Rhee differed somewhat from the other panelists in laying
substantial blame at the feet of teachers and school administrators.
In D.C.in 2007, only eight per cent of eighth graders were performing
at grade level in mathematics, she said, and yet the performance
evaluations of the adults in the school system found 95 per cent were
rated as doing an excellent jobs.
"You can't have a functional system with that kind of disconnect," she
said.
While she acknowledged the societal and cultural issues referred to by
the other panelists, Ms. Rhee said a significant part of the problem
related to the "utter lack of accountability" in the system.
As to solutions, the panel proposed a variety of measures, starting
even before birth and extending well beyond school. Improving prenatal
maternal health would help because one-third of low birth weight
babies have learning difficulties. Reforming the justice system so it
did not lead to the world's highest imprisonment rates would make
black families a whole lot more functional.
Among other generally-agreed measures were: placing greater emphasis
on early childhood education; better training of teachers in how to
deal with children coming into the system with underdeveloped skills;
smaller classes, which had been shown to be of particular benefit for
African American children; more emphasis on basic nutrition and
health, and; less emphasis on standardized tests, or at least a less
punitive response to them. There should also be more research into why
successful schools work.
There were also points of disagreement. Ms. Rhee firmly held that too
many bad teachers were allowed to continue in the system. Others,
notably Ms. Ravich, strongly disagreed.
Lawrence Bobo. But ultimately the real problem was not with the
teachers, the parents, or the kids. The fifth panelist, who summed up
the other four, Lawrence D. Bobo, the W.E.B. Du Bois professor of
Social Sciences at Harvard, hammered this home.
It was poverty. The country that had a record of slavery, Jim Crow
laws, ghettos and now mass incarceration also subjected its black
population to a kind of poverty almost no whites experienced, he said.
It was a poverty where many children existed at 50 per cent below the
poverty line, in neighborhoods where virtually everyone else also was
in poverty, and where almost no men had jobs.
And you can't fix the schools without fixing that.
--
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--
La Vonda R. Staples
Adjunct Professor, Department of Social Sciences
Community College of the District of Columbia
314-570-6483
"It is the duty of all who have been fortunate to receive an education to assist others in the same pursuit."
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