Affirmative action in the schools?

Great Debates
1

When I was hired as a teacher, they called me aside after the contract signing to tell me that, as a male teaching at a school receiving Title I funds (i.e., a school serving a large number of kids on the free/reduced lunch program), I would receive a $1000 bonus: they were trying to diversify the staff at such schools, and I and every other non-white-woman who signed up to teach there got the bonus. I was inadvertently a recipient of affirmative action. Perhaps a nobler man than me would have turned down the taxpayer money. I took it.

At my school, and at other elementary schools I’ve been at, there has been a huge number of white women teachers. There has been a sizable minority of white men teachers. There has been a small number of black women teachers. And while the school employs black men, it’s exclusively in support roles such as maintenance and custodial work.

Now, maintenance and custodial work are noble occupations–let’s dispense early with any suggestion to the contrary. But they’re low-paying occupations as well. And here’s where we get into what I was thinking about yesterday.

A lot of the black boys at our school come from impoverished neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are pretty self-contained: there’s no way to walk or ride a bike from them to the rest of the town, due to dangerous streets, and they’re crime- and gang-ridden. Some of these boys may literally not encounter a black man who holds a middle-class job even once a month. And these aren’t race-blind kids, either–let’s dispense with that, also. At seven years old they’re acutely conscious of race.

Poor white boys at the school see me and other white teachers, white men holding down middle-class jobs. Even if they never have one of us as their teacher, they see us on a daily basis. Poor white girls can’t avoid seeing white women holding down middle-class jobs. Poor black girls see a few black women holding down middle-class jobs. But the highest-paying legitimate work some of these poor black boys see are the school’s custodians; and while I’ve had plenty of children tell me they want to grow up to be a teacher, I’ve yet to have one tell me they want to be a custodian when they grow up.

In short, these race-conscious black boys do not at home or at school have black men who are role models for them, who can embody a middle-class idea of success.

And I think that sucks. Certainly there are other paths to success than middle-class values: there’s the military, there’s the back-to-the-landers, there’s making it big in sports or entertainment. But one of the primary values of public schools, I think, is giving everyone some baseline skills they can use if they want to make it in a middle-class society. And central to that may be giving kids a constant reminder that they can do it, by showing them folks with whom they identify who have done it.

I worry that a lot of our black boys become disengaged from school in large part because it just doesn’t look relevant to them: they don’t regularly encounter black men for whom school was very useful.

So my question, or rather, three questions:

  1. Is it worth making an extra effort to get black men into elementary schools, to provide black boys with some academic role models?
  2. If it is, what would be the best way to do that? (This would also be a good place to address some of the powerful reasons why there aren’t more black men in schools).
  3. If it isn’t, do you have a different suggestion for how we can address this lack of role models with whom many poor black boys can identify?

I think my position is clear, but in case it’s not, I believe it’d absolutely be worthwhile to try to attract more black males into education. Short of professionalizing the career (with greater entrance barriers, greater autonomy, and greater pay), I’m not sure how to do that effectively, though.

Finally, I wish the dear departed Askia were still around: I can think of nobody whose opinion I’d be more interested in hearing on this thread.

Daniel

2

I understand your intention but I want to ask what you think of the contrary evidence regarding other ethnic groups.

For example, Indian kids often go through elementary school on onward to high school without seeing a single Indian teacher. Why is it not necessary for them to have a role model that works at the school? Is there another factor that overrides the scenario of school teachers having same ethnic similarity?

3

In general, immigrant kids are coming from middle class homes or immigrant neighborhoods where the parents and neighbors, themselves, provide role models.

Due to a lot of different factors throughout the twentieth century, those models and relationships have been broken in inner city black neighborhoods.

ETA: If you are speaking of North American Indian kids, I suspect that you will find that the situations and LHoD’s proposals equally apt for those kids.

4

Odd phrasing.

I assume you mean you mean " Is it worth making an extra effort to get black men as teachers in elementary schools, to provide black boys with some academic role models?" In that case my answer is “No”.
First off getting people of any race any where necessarily entails racial discrimination against some other race. And my position is that the end never justifies the means. IOW it’s not worth it to intitutionalise racial discrimination no matter how noble the cause.

Secondly, how could we possibly do this? It’s not like an advertising campaign is going to work. I can only see it being possible if we lower the bar for black men who want to be teachers. That is not only racist but it’s counter-productive. Now black boys get to see black men in middle class jobs struggling and doing a really bad job, and white boys get to see black men as being incapable of doing anything but janitorial work successfully. That’s going to make the problem worse, not better. Black kids will likely think that middle class work is too hard for them and white kids will think that blacks are only suited to menial labour.

Bad, bad, bad idea in my opinion. Maybe you have some plan by which we can get more black men into teaching without lowering the standard or discriminating against others, and if so let’s hear it. But all the options I can think of are counterproductive.

The reasons seem obvious: black men are either incapable of becoming teachers or uninterested in it.
If you overcome the first then you’re lowering the bar and discriminating against others.
If you overcome the second then you are creating a cultural divide between the teachers and the students and discriminating against others.

This isn’t a problem that can be targetted. The solution is to make balck communities equal to white communities. When you have middle class black neighbourhoods (or no black neighbourhoods) you’ll have lots of black teachers. Until then you’re treating the grazed knee and ignoring the amputated arm.

I suspect the best option is to make an effort to get middle class black men who aren’t teachers into elementary schools, to provide black boys with some academic role models.

I personally think schooling would be well served by routine guest speakers anyway. Teachers simply lack the knowledge in a lot of areas. We had a few guest speakers in high school on topics such as AIDS prevention and financial counselling and they were great. Much more effective than teachers if only because they were new faces. If schools had regular guest speakers then a reasonable proportion of black males could be amongst them. These men wouldn’t be incompetent, they wouldn’t look like tokens and they wouldn’t be their because they took jobs away form non-black, non-male teachers.

I suspect that more precisely you believe it’d be worthwhile to try to attract more competent black males into education. I’ve seen a few cases of affirmative action that attracted in incompetents/less competents. Worse than doing nothing.

I think that part of the problem is that there are so many organisations that want to attract blacks as part of their diversity program, and so few (relatively) blacks that are prepared to work for a tertiary qualification that those who do are spoiled for choice. Simply having finished a college course opens so many opportunities that teaching is unappealing except to the tiny few who find it their true calling.

5

To me it sounds like you’re making a better argument for boarding schools that are out of the impoverished environment and free-to-board.

6

My (limited) experience with these sorts of scheme sis that they don’t work. The kids all seem to develop a “real world” and “school world” mental state. School is seen as not being reals, and as soon as the return home to the “real world” they revert to their old thoughts and behaviours.

Not that they don’t have their good points, but I don’t think they’re a good way of presenting options to kids. What goes on at at school isn’t real, the teachers aren’t real and none of it applies to real life.

I suppose if you sent me to live in a Hare Krisna commune I might develop the same attitude. The people are all very nice and everything but there’s no way I’d believe that the mung beans and pacifism attitude was applicable to the real world where I have to live and work.

7

On the other hand lots of guys go into the military because they feel like they have no future where they are nor any idea how to achieve it, and come out all ready to get going.

It probably just depends on the format (and especially depends on actual data as opposed to personal experience).

8

Different situations though. Grown men vs children. Changing the way they view themselves vs changing the way they see others.

Like I said, boarding programs have their good points, especially if local schools really suck at just teaching. But I don’t think they;re a good way to change the way kids see their options. A black man at a boarding school just isn’t applicable to being black man in the real world any more than a Black man in Nigeria.

Data? We don’t need no steenkin’ data.

9

But neither is the kids’ home experience. The point is to get them out of a situation where they feel like they’re on the bottom rung, and put them in an environment where they can advance themselves in the hierarchy, even if just via grades.

10

  1. I think so.

  2. I don’t know but here are some ideas: You don’t have to discriminate against some races and genders per se. For example, you can advertise in the parts of the city where it is most visible to black men. If there is no practical transportation for people in that area, you can try to get a shuttle or see if the city would add bus stops. If there is some small required piece of training that nobody there ever gets the chance to take, you can cause it to be offered there from time to time. In other words, suppose that the reasons there are no black men teaching in the school are not because black men are deficient in some way, but rather because various obstacles tend to target them more and various advantages tend to target them less, and work on fixing those obstacles and spreading those advantages around better. I think this does a better job of dealing with things that should be different, and doesn’t rely on treating applicants according to their race.

11

Precisely. As I said, a lot of these black boys can go weeks without seeing a black man who holds a middle-class job. (I just remembered an exception: our school resource officer is a black man, but then, the students don’t see him very often at all, and the most prolonged interaction they have with him is when someone gets in huge trouble). I’m not sure that’s true for most immigrant groups.

Blake, there’s already discrimination to get men and nonwhite women into these schools, as I mentioned. I’m assuming you think these programs should be ended, right? I think discrimination in this case may be legitimate because the long history of Jim Crow did much to destroy black social networks in the South, and we’re still suffering from the effects of Jim Crow. We need to do something drastic to break the current cycle.

Guest speakers are an interesting idea, but as a teacher, I can tell you that they’re often horrible. If you don’t spend a lot of time around eight-year-olds, you may not know how to use language that they can understand. It’s quite common for us to get a guest speaker whose presentation is riddled with technical language: a county commissioner who talks about zoning ordinances and levying additional property tax, an Asian educator who talks about pedagogical practices that emphasize manipulatives and interactive education, a meteorologist who uses words like barometric pressure without defining them. The guest speaker who knows to define terms or use age-appropriate vocabulary is kind of rare, in my experience :).

12

I’m expresed my ambivalent feeling about AA in the past, but I do support active recruiting of males, especially black males, into the teaching profession. I attended the Atlanta Public School system for 13 years (Atlanta, for those who don’t know, is overwhelming a black city), and I had a sum total of four black male teachers. Though I did have a couple of black men as vice-principals

Now I had a father at home and a middle-class upbringing that exposed me to things, but most of my black classmates were not so lucky.

Not only does it come down to role models, but to discipline. Style of discipline is a outgrowth of culture; what works for a white child from a particular demographic isn’t going to necessarily work for a black child of another. As a kid, we all knew which teachers not to fuck around with, and sorry to say, but most of them were either black or “ethnic” white (like Jewish). WASP teachers tended to be great with the well-behaved kids and could engender respect from the borderline kids, but they were clueless with the straight-up bad-asses. Black teachers weren’t afraid to cuss your ass out and call your mother right in the middle of class, so the whole class could be privy to your humliation. Yes, I speak from first-hand experience.

I don’t remember anyone talking back or being disruptive in the classes where the black men were the teachers. And they were usually the hardest on the black students (especially the boys)…which is definitely not right but I guess it’s better than them having low expectations.

My father used to hire teachers when he was a principal, and he made no qualms about favoring males (of any race) over females. Male teachers are so hugely underrepresented that it’s been implicated for the gender gap in performance between boys and girls. So in the case of educational hiring, I am all for AA.

13

One thing that won’t work is a recruitment bonus that prospects don’t know about until they sign a contract. That’s one of the dumber ideas I’ve read lately.

14

Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a Chicken/Egg problem. How do you develop solid middle class black neighborhoods with black children (especially boys) living lives without proper role models?

zagloba, in addition to that, who is going to make a major career decision based on a one time $1,000 bonus? If LHoD had a variety of options, I have no doubt that there would be enough pluses and minuses to far outweigh $1,000, over the course of a career. If LHoD didn’t have options, then he’d take the job without the bonus.

15

You keep saying this. I don’t think it’s true. On the contrary, I would bet that most black males that “these black boys” see at home are multi-millionaires. If role models on TV don’t count, why? How much interaction must one of “these black boys” have with a black male adult for that black male adult to count as a role model?

Also, do you have a cite for the proposition that “these black boys” would have better life outcomes if they had a black male teacher? This idea is being treated as accepted truth, but it ain’t necessarily so. Would one black male teacher be enough, or is there some tipping point at a certain number, or do their outcomes get better on a smooth curve as the number of black male teachers increase? The fact that you haven’t discussed any of this is very telling to me about how you really feel about “these black boys.”. That is, in the same breath that you lament Jim Crow, you keep its core idea alive, which is that “these black boys” shouldn’t be held to the same standards as everyone else because they can’t do anything about their own inferiority.

16

I think the problem is very real, based on the experience of people I know who have worked in inner city schools. From what I understand, a high percentage of kids by a certain age have as their life goals to be basketball players or rappers. Completely unrealistic.

It’s more than just school, though. Many of these kids don’t see any black middle class males outside of school either. I imagine having black male teachers would help, but I don’t know if it would be enough.

One thing that it might help a lot with is the perception that many black kids have that scholastic success is “acting white”.

That’s an interesting point, re affirmative action. As noted in another thread, blacks don’t need as high scores on various tests to get accepted into medical school, and this would presumably apply to law school and whatever else. One side affect of that would be to shrink the pool of college graduates available for other jobs.

17

And the multi-millionaire African American males that you refer to are holding “middle-class jobs”? I don’t think you really understand what a middle-class job is, do you?

18

I thought his point was that they see blacks portraying middle class people on TV.

19

I am guessing the issue is there are not many black men (relatively compared to other groups) who choose to go to college to become teachers.

How can you fix that? Certainly you cannot force people to train for a job they do not want to do.

Get a sizable increase in African-Americans trained as teachers and I suspect you will see a lot more in the classroom.

ETA: It may be that many young black males have such a terrible experience with school when growing up they are not inclined to train to become a teacher. Just speculating.

20

I agree (although I don’t like seeing “fuck” in the middle of GD posts. Love, your Dad). In the end, as I struggle with how to try to promote a just, balanced and diverse society I don’t see any way around race-based AA. I don’t think quotas have to exactly reflect prevailing population groups, but it seems as if the black community is more sensitive than all others about their lack of representation in various spheres.

It seems to me we have to suck it up, hold our nose, admit race-based AA is totally unfair in the narrow sense, and yet somehow can contribute more to the cause of improving society than it detracts.

It would not surprise me if race-based quotas for black men are difficult to fill for teaching. I live in the corporate world, and competition to recruit educated black men is fierce, for the same reason: corporations are desperate to promote diversity and the pool is limited.