Yeah, I can imagine a few scenarios. But they’re rare. And more pertinently you aren’t randomly killing people because you don’t like something about them. They do actually have to pose a threat to you to claim self defence.
That’s hugely different to firing someone who is no threat to you because you don’t like the colour of their skin.
Why would it have to take so long?
Presumably you could look at school records and find out if there is any correlation between the number of black male teachers and how well kids do later in life. Then you’d have to try getting rid of other variables that might have influenced the results.
I’m a white female and didn’t see a live black person until I was 15, but my best teachers until that age were one man and one woman, whereas 95% of my teachers until that same time had been women.
Having access to all kinds of people is good, but knowing that 99% of a human being is not defined by genitalia and color is much more important. I hated being classified by my genitalia when I was 3yo (“young ladies don’t run!”) and I hate it at 41.
That joke kid? He isn’t conscious of “race.” He is using color as a code for ideology - that’s a different animal.
I’ve been thinking about it, and a story came to mind.
I taught computer science for two years in a technical high school in a small village in Cameroon. The area was a difficult place to be a woman- arranged marriage in the early teens was common, few women every went to high school, women did the most backbreaking labor from sunup to sundown and most women had few choices in their life.
I taught a good chunk of my school’s handful of women- and was one of three female staff members in a school of 2,000 kids. My female students were in the “secretarial” track, although few would really ever work. Only a couple kids in my class would expect to graduate high school. None would expect to go to college. Mostly they were in school in hopes of attracting a teacher to marry. Their lives were tough, and the future they had to look forward to was pretty bleak.
The first year was rough. I was teaching in French- a language I had just learned. We only had six computers for classes that numbered into the hundreds of students. Nothing was easy. But we tried our best, and I was able to teach a bit.
The second year I returned to the same class of girls. I handed them beginning of the year surveys. One question was “what do you want to do when you finish school.”
Over half of them said “computer science teacher.”
These girls had never in their life seen a woman who was pursuing her goals. Just seeing that, just knowing it was possible, gave them a new sense of who they were and what they were capable of. I had an effect on those girls that a male teacher would never have had.
So I think there is something to it.
I personally hate “affirmative action” if it takes the form of lowering the bar or choosing a less qualified person of the “right” race. However as has already been mentioned this doesn’t need to neccessarily need to be the case to get more black male teachers into Elementry (Primary) schools.
The “action” could take the form of (for example) scholarship bonds - hey, I’ll give (insert group) a full ride scholarship, but you must teach for XX years, it could take the form of aditional salary, more advertising specifically targeting the “needed” race. There are many many ways to get more black males teaching that DON’T include lowering standards.
Secondly, if you are looking for evidence to back up LHoD’s assertion, perhaps you can do some research on the New Zealand education system. There male teachers (race is a much smaller factor) are basically unheard of in the Elementry (Primary) system, and now there is a massive gap between the performance of boys and girls. This lack of role models in school is posited as one reason for the difference. (I’m not gonna look up the exact stats now, this has come from multiple newspaper articles).
Also, for those that are saying that there is no evidence that having black male teachers would help. Do you have any evidence that it wouldn’t help? Until such time that you can produce that evidence, it seems like a reasonably hypothesis to work under until more evidence does come to hand - after all, the idea of good role models, and their impace on individual performance is pretty well substaniated in psychological literature right?
But they all require discrimination and reducing the opportunities of others. If the government paid whites more than blacks for identical work, or threw black shcolarship applications ointo the bin without even opening them, how would you feel about that? Yet that is precisely what you are proposing
It always is. But is there any evidence for such a claim? That’s the question.
I personally believe it is linked. But this is the Dope, and it’s not unreasonable to demand evidence for a stated belief.
I don’t know. Is it? If so can you provide some meta-studies confirming that?
“You can’t prove it’s not right so we should assume it is and hurt lots of people and spend lots of money until more evidence does come to hand” is not reasonable. It’s a horrible way to govern country. We spend money without some evidence that it’s being spent effectively, and we certainly don’t hurt people without a lot of evidence that the good outweighs the bad.
At this stage we have no evidence at all that it will do any good or work in any way at all. So your position is just an argument from ignorance.
Actually no, they don’t reduce my opportunities (unless you call attracting additional qualified applicants reducing my opportunities). They enhance the rewards of the selected group. There is a difference.
Think of it as a golf competition. On the US tour, everybody plays from a scratch handicap. What if I host a competition on Beng’s home course. One year I decide to increase the prize money from $100,000 to $10,000,000. All of a sudden the likes of Phil Mikelson, Tiger Woods and John Daley are going to be competing. But everybody is playing from a level playing field.
I know its not totally analogous, but offering “better rewards” is a whole lot preferable than lowering the bar right? (starting from the base assumption that there will be positive benefits from this - which is not yet a given)
Sorry, I don’t even begin to know how to research, read and parse meta studies. Being at work at the moment, with only access to google over a slow connection its not something that I will be able to empirically research.
What I see at the moment is a hypothesis that (appears) to have logic on its side. That I am assuming from my general knowledge and reading is suported by what is currenty known about individual performance. (re: positive role models and performance). As I don’t have, and I don’t think we are likely to have, explicit studies supporting the hypothesis I think it is a worthwhile experiment.
After all - prior to universal suffrage was their any studies that supported the idea of women having the vote? Prior to the forced integration of schools in the 60’s what empirical evidence was there that this was desirable?
So, assuming you are a white woman, you will have the same opportunity to get a high paying teaching job as a black man? If so then you can’t be paying black men any more.
And you will have the same opportunities to get a scholarship as a black man? If so then you aren’t offering black men any scholarships.
Look, this is pretty basic stuff. If members of Group A have more opportunities than group B, then Group B must have fewer opportunities than group A. That’s basic logic. It’s also first grade maths.
No, there isn’t. You can’t have members of one group having relatively more rewards without the other group also having relatively fewer rewards.
It’s amazing how all the same lame excuses and twisted logic that was used to support Jim Crow always gets trotted out by people supporting AA.
We aren’t giving coloured less drinking fountains. Hell there are 10 more coloured drinking fountains now than 10 years ago. We’re just providing more new drinking fountains for white folk.
That is only true if everybody has an equal chance to compete for the 10, 00, 000 dollars.
When you offer the $10, 000, 000 prize only to the white players, how is that a level field?
When you offer the $10, 000 scholarship only to the black students, how is that a level field.
When you offer the $10, 000 bonus only to the black teachers, how is that a level field.
A level field means just that: everybody starts at the same level, and everybody’s goal is the same level. What you are proposing is giving black people a completely different goal. That; the very antithesis of a level playing field.
It is in fact perfectly analogous, and it highlights perfectly why your proposals are blatant racial discrimination and clearly unjust. You might think the end justifies the means, and that hurting innocent whites is OK to help innocent blacks. I don’t.
I don’t know. Is having your toenails removed by a pair of blunt pliers better than being thrown naked into a pool full of used razor blades?
You’ve given me two unjust, immoral options and asked me which is better. Why do I need to make a choice?
That’s OK. I do know how to do it but don’t care enough to bother. But then I’m not proposing institutionalised racial discrimination as a solution to the problem either.
Yes. Like the sun orbiting the Earth,or black people being closer other animals. And we all know how well they turned out when they were examined.
You think that giving people lower wages for the same work and refusing them scholarships based on the colour of their skin is a good idea despite having no evidence at all that it will help anyone?
Really?
The question doesn’t make any sense? What is the objectively falsifiable hypothesis? If you are asking if there was any evidence that women physically could vote, then there was of course evidence available to that effect.
None. And there is still no evidence that it is desirable today. There is still considerable debate as to whether integration is overall harmful or helpful to black academic performance. Also read "The segregated school here.
Which should be note of caution about why we shouldn’t do these sorts of things without evidence. Desegregating schools may have been the worst thing ever for black schoolchildren. Do you have any evidence that your policies wouldn’t be worse?
You will compete for the job on the same, equal footing. The most qualified, talented and suitable person will get the job.
I don’t think that in this case it needs to be viewed as a “zero sum game” though. Paying the black male more, doesn’t neccessarily mean paying the white one less than what they are receiving now / would be receiving. What if the funds for the extra pay came from a “different” budget for example? (I am not familiar with all the different advocacy groups under the US govt, but I would bet that there are federal grants for stuff like crime reduction, improving literacy rates, increasing minority participation on college - perhaps funding could be found from one of these areas if it is thought that this programme would have those specific benefits).
My view of Affirmative Action is that it gives the job to a less qualified candidate due to their race. If, and its a mighty big if, it is established that having more black male teachers is a good thing - then I would much rather this be achieved by offering more rewards to black males to enter teaching than by letting black males with lower standards enter teaching.
You are of course right in that the harm of this also has to be balanced against the benefit of having the teacher there.
It would be a shame to derail the basic premise of this thread - i.e it would be a good thing to have more black male teachers as role models with an argument about what constitutes the best way to get more black male teachers.
Look, I don’t think it’s escaped anyone’s notice that you totally failed to address the question asked: assuming you are a white woman, you will have the same opportunity to get a high paying teaching job as a black man?
So if a white woman is the most qualified, talented and suitable person will she get the same high paying job as the black man? Or will she get a job, but one that pays much less for substantially the same work?
No, it just means paying them less for exactly the same work. IOW there are fewer high paying jobs available for white people than there are for blacks.
Quick question: there are 100 teaching jobs in my town open to new graduates. New graduate white people get paid $29, 990 per annum. Under your scheme how many jobs paying >$30, 000 are potentially available to white graduates? And how jobs paying >$30, 000 are potentially available to black graduates.
If you can give us a straight answer to that question you will hopefully understand why your scheme necessarily reduces opportunities for whites.
What of it? Do white people have the same opportunity to get those funds as black people? That’s the only question at hand. If white people don’t have the same opportunity to get those funds then it’s tautological that white people have fewer opportunities to get funds than black people.
My actual position, which I’ve stated several times, is that the benefit can never balance the harm caused. The ends can never justify the means.
If we accept this ends-justify-the-means BS then we would have to support Jim Crow, because there’s no doubt that white neighbourhoods had less crime than black neighbourhoods. So long as I believe that the benefit of having a safe neigbourhood outweighs the harm of stopping blacks from living there, you are bound to support me for the same reasons that you support AA.
This isn’t a slippery slope. It’s straight rode to hell.
That premise is a non-issue. With no evidence on either side there’s simply nothing to debate until someone comes up with a reason why they think it is or is not not a good idea. Nobody’s doing that, all they’re doing is saying they see no reason to believe it or that, like you, they simply believe that it is.
Blake, I think a black man does have a qualification that a white woman doesn’t have, in general: the black man is capable of serving as a role model of academic success for a certain underserved population in a way that the white woman is not. This isn’t always true, but I believe it is true often enough that this real qualification may be considered. If white girls were scoring fifty percentage points behind black boys at our school, and if there were zero white women in middle-class roles at the school, I’d want to have an action to provide those white girls with role models. It just so happens that the folks with the qualifications to be role models for the underserved population are black males.
(As for your comments about guest speakers, that’d be a hijack–I’ll just say that you don’t really know what you’re talking about here, but have the common and annoying attitude that you know how to educate better than educators do).
edit: duplicate post
The same job? Yes. The same pay? not neccessarily. From the angle of attack you are using I am quite happy to concede the point.
I would just like to counterpoint. From an economics standpoint.
IF your starting point is the position “we need more black male teachers in elementry schools” (yes yes, I know it’s not settled as being desirable). How do you achieve this?
You could:
Which of the two is more desirable.
On the other hand, I did take a very brief look at some research that when selecting a mentor (which is similiar to what we are looking for right?) shared experience is the most important factor. So maybe if we had a means of selecting somebody that had “shared exerperience” with the targeted students that was independent of race this would be preferable to you.
If we found such a person, would you agree to them being paid more on the basis that they were more valuable in the position?
I am not in the US, recently here we had a push by the education ministry to hire “mid career professionals” for the teaching profession. Although these people still entered teaching as “junior teachers” they were offered a higher salary than the same cohort that had no professional experience.
I don’t find it too unreasonable to offer skills that are realtively scarce a higher salary. This is the law of suppply and demand at work.
Cool thread… sorry I am getting to it so late. This is actually quite close to my area of research. I also taught in a 99% African American school, and for the majority of my two years there, I was the only African American male teacher in a self-contained classroom. (We had a couple of resource teachers - essentially bouncers - for the behavioral adjustment class, three coaches, several custodians, and the principal.) Basically, pretty much whenever the kids encountered an adult Black male in school, he was disciplining them or yelling at them to lift more weight, etc.
There are several studies that point to the importance of role modeling and mentoring for Black male students - I’m thinking specifically of the work of Marvin Lynn, a friend and researcher at the University of Illinois - Chicago, and Shaun Harper at the University of Pennsylvania. I can dig up specific cites later, but Spencer Holland’s op-ed here discusses the issue here - he has several peer-reviewed articles on this topic.
I don’t know if the incentive that LHoD is enough, to be honest. It comes very late in the process. I’d think a better approach is to build a pipeline of educated Black males who can become teachers. Loans targeted to Black males, which are forgiven if they dedicate X years to teaching in schools deigned to be lacking in Black males, might be a better idea. A lot of young Black men I encounter at my uni are interested in helping out, but the career ladder for teachers is pretty flat, the pay sucks, and the prestige in the profession is lacking.
There is a serious problem with the statistics that tell us that around 85% of emerging teachers from certification programs are White females. Why is the distribution so heavily skewed? I think it has a lot to do with role modeling - White female students see so many White women teaching in their careers, so they can see themselves in the job. Similar effects with women and nursing.
Compare this to Black males - in the community in which I taught (Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas) there were four major career aspirations: hustler/drug dealer, preacher, athlete, or rapper. Because these were the Black males they saw in their community - not to dismiss the multitude of Black men who worked jobs for hourly wages, but the kids could look out their window and on their block and see men in these four careers and see the respect and income they accrued from their choices. Note that only one is illegal, but one’s ability to gain respect or a decent income from at least two of the careers in virtually nonexistent.
I’m pretty consistent on this front. I’d like to see similar incentives for women in the engineering sciences, for instance. And this might sound stupid, but seeing someone like Jason Williams have some success in the NBA probably helped a lot of White kids see that it was possible to play on that level. Ditto for Jason Sehorn playing cornerback in the NFL.
Bigger reason is the hours.
I find it interesting that a lot of people outside the US who would be considered minorities in the US tend to think that Affirmative Action is just entitlement (I’m basing this on anecdotal data). For me, it just smacks of special treatment. To be honest, when I hear of Affirmative Action and the special challenges that African Americans face, I want to say - stop whining. You don’t live in a third world country (like I do). Any challenges you face there would pale in comparison to the challenges that ordinary people face here. But people here don’t expect special treatment. Sure, certain programs are designed to specifically help the underprivileged, but it’s based on poverty level and NOT race. As far as role models are concerned, that’s the problem of the African American community. You already have Obama. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what will.
And I think that the white woman has a qualification that a black man have, in general: the white woman is capable of turning up for work on time and not molesting children in a way that the black man is not.
That’s racist bullshit of course, but at least I can produce statistics that support the generalisations. You can’t even do that.
If you want to make “capable of serving as a role model” a selection criterion for the job then find a way of objectively measuring it. But if you simply assume that all black men are good role models and all white women are not that is sexist and it’s racist.
Ahh, the old “I can’t support my claims, so I’ll say you you don’t even have the right to disagree with me” line. How quaint.
All I need to do is note black boys are scoring fifty percentage points behind white girls at at your school. That’s all the information we need on how capable the educators are.
Neither, they are both morally repugnant
How about I offer you my choices:
We make it illegal for for colleges to train black males for any profession aside from teaching.
We make it an offence to employ any black male for a salary greater than the minimum he could obtain teaching.
Which of the two is more desirable?
If you’re willing to solve this problem by reducing the opportunities, competitivenness and earning capacities of some races for some races then there are far more effective methods than the two you propose.
Let’s not pussy foot around here. You are proposing to solve this problem by open racial discrimination by the state. I find that abhorrent, but you apparently don’t. So if you endorse open racial discrimination by the state why pissfart around? Why not just adopt the most effective and direct method of addressing the problem?
I might also add that we could:
4) Declare all black boys to be property of the school and we train them, using whips where necessary, to be teachers and then force them to teach?
But that might be going a touch to far.
I don’t see it as similar at all. A mentor is primarily a personal advocate and advisor. A teacher is a group authority figure and evaluator.
Insofar as I wouldn’t completely oppose it, I suppose it’s preferable. See this isn’t racists because it doesn’t start with the supposition that all white people are incapable of acting as role models, and all black people are perfectly capable.
As soon as you have a policy based on the idea that all of race X is incapable of anything, that’s what we call a bigoted and racist policy.
I already addressed this above. I don’t care what selection criteria you use for the job, so long as it has some bearing on the job and can be objectively evaluated.
I agree. Now all you have to do is come up with some objective way of measuring those skills.
White people are less prone to abusing alcohol to the extent that it interferes with their work. So I assume that you think that justifies all employers paying white people more than black? After all skills like turning up to work on Monday morning are valuable, and should command a higher salary? Right?
Wrong. Because not all black people abuse alcohol, and not all white people don’t. And not all black men make good role models. And not all white women don’t. As long as your policies are based on an assumption that all of any race is less capable than all of another race it’s racist and immoral.
Evaluate the skill of each individual and pay based on that skill level ,fine. But how much melanin you have in your skin is not a skill.
Those two are completely unlike one another. It’s a shame, Blake–for a minute there you’d tricked me into thinking you could debate in a civil fashion.
I started a pit thread about this thread, by the way. It’s of course been hijacked all to hell by my fans, but if anyone here would like to try to bring it back on topic, I’d appreciate it.