This article"Unsayable Truths about a Failing High School" speaks to that question. It tries to be polite, but basically says that in a practical sense a lot of failing urban school dysfunction can mainly be laid at the feet of black, single mother families and their school age children’s tendency to be violent, disrespectful to authority, academically disengaged and also not have academic performance monitored or supported at home. The synopsis of the article is that and we can be as polite as we want but there is no fix for this as long as this situation persists.
Not gonna touch “tendency to be violent, disrespectful to authority, academically disengaged” with a 10 foot pole. I do believe however that if you don’t have parent(s) at home with enough spare time and academic knowledge to make sure you’ve done your homework, make you redo it if you slacked, and help you if you genuinely don’t understand something, you’re pretty much screwed. The 20/30 year outcomes for headstart and other programs like it tend to revert to baseline. The magic bullet seems to be concern about academic success in the home. And that’s not always feasible when its a single parent working 3 jobs situation. What the heck to do about it on a school district/state/nation level - I have no idea. More money for education probably won’t hurt, but it might not be a cure-all either.
Sounds like standard blaming the victim to me. Why *wouldn’t *they be disrespectful of authority, when that authority is consistently devoted to hating and persecuting them? And maybe they wouldn’t be in a single parent household in the first place if their father wasn’t thrown in prison thanks to America’s massively racist law enforcement system. And maybe they wouldn’t be academically disengaged if they had some reason to hope for a better future.
I 'm not totally convinced the the point of the article is to lay the blame solely on the black community. Yes, that is part of the problem. But, the student body president mentions that he sees many of the problems being from an administration who cannot or wont care to deal with the trouble makers so hence, those troublemakers are allowed to run the school.
Thing is from what I’ve seen from my experience in urban education, is that there are 3 kinds of kids. Leaders, followers, and those who just get out of the way. There are good and bad kids in all categories and the thing is, if you remove the bad kids, the “followers” will actually follow the good kids.
My solution was and still is, to run urban schools like military academies. Make it so while you dont care what happens on the outside, once you walk thru that front door you follow a strict set of rules. This requires massive security and an administration ready and willing to do whatever it takes. if that means kicking out the bad kids - do it. if that means firing bad teachers - do it. The film Lean on Me is a good example. It also takes teachers who are actually going to work hard to help the kids learn.
I remember being an assistant teacher in upstate New York almost a decade ago. African-American students were often belligerent, defiant, unruly, etc. African-African students were often far better behaved, though.
I think the “black, single mother families” part is a red herring.
I have long thought that there are basically four components to school success:
Students
Parents
Teachers
Administration (which includes principals, superintendents, the Board of Education, and state and federal legislatures, etc)
And they’re in that order. You could have a school with the best teachers and principals on the planet, but if the students come to school high, hungry, or without a care for their education, that school is going to fail. And the primary reason students have those problems is because their home life is not the best.
I don’t think race makes that much of a difference. There are disobedient, aggressive, and uncaring white, latino, asian, and multiracial students. Those students will do poorly no matter what school they are in. I also think if there’s a percentage of those students above a certain threshold, they’ll bring the rest of the school down with them.
It’s the key problem of education: the parts we can change (teachers and administration) are not the parts that have the greatest effect. That is the real “unsayable truth”. If the community around a school doesn’t care about education, that school is going to fail. Period.
How do you fix that? I suppose there are ways, like economic incentives for academic performance, or free breakfast/lunch/dinner so students aren’t malnourished, or a basic income so that single parent doesn’t have to work three jobs, or good sex ed/free birth contorl so students aren’t dropping out to have a baby, or free rehab so students aren’t getting high instead of studying. All of those are fraught with problems, the biggest being that they all require money to fix and aren’t actually academic issues but result in academic problems.
Your points are cogent but the article’s take is that “disobedient, aggressive, and uncaring” behavior norms are far more pervasive among children of black, single mother households than any other ethnic groups. They are presenting this as a hard fact. While there are “disobedient, aggressive, and uncaring white, latino, asian, and multiracial students” they exist in far smaller percentages relative to the student body. The point is that there are so many kids like this in urban schools they effectively cripple the learning process and the school’s ability to function as a place of learning for the kids that do want to learn and until the dysfunctional family scenario is fixed nothing is going to improve.
I read a similar article on the problems in Minneapolis schools - that they were afraid of being called racist if they disciplined trouble-makers, because the trouble-makers were disproportionately black. Their solution was to make it harder to suspend students of color, and get rid of the police resource officers. In St. Paul, a related approach led to a tripling of assaults on school staff, including a teacher who received a traumatic brain injury. “Suspensions are down but violence is up” does not strike me as a good approach to the problem of racial disparity in school discipline.
Let me ask my standard question when a white person says the “unsayable truth” about black people: In your opinion, why are black people like that?
Is it something inherent to being black that causes this behavior? Or is the environment that black people live in that causes this behavior?
If it’s the environment, then shouldn’t we be working to change that environment? Let’s eliminate the terrible conditions that a lot of black children are growing up in.
My parents taught in all black schools when I was a kid (yes, segregated schools still existed into the 1980’s and well beyond in parts of the U.S. regardless of what history trivia suggests). My mother found some degree of fame by developing techniques to motivate any classroom even for students coming from extreme poverty and violent households. It can be done at least while students are in class but you can’t control everything that goes on outside of school. A predictable percentage of her students still ended up in prison for heinous crimes or just serial thuggery.
However, there have been some surprising success stories. One black lady that came from one of the most dysfunctional and criminal families that you can imagine used Air Force enlistment to put herself through college and is now a full Byrd Colonel and may even go higher. Nobody would have bet on her when she was a kid but she was voted “most successful” at her 20 year high school reunion and gave a rousing speech about how she did it.
She is one of many success stories mixed in with a whole lot of failures and even more people that are struggling to get by the same way their family always has. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any way to save everyone. There has to be some base level of motivation and value structure for any education to work and not everyone has that regardless of their race or background. What can be done is provide opportunities for those that want to make it out.
I’m assuming that by black, you mean Somali? I’ve heard many times that the Somali community has basically taken over the Twin Cities, and sadly, I have never heard one positive thing about them from people who lived anywhere around them. :rolleyes: :eek:
The poster who mentioned Head Start made me think of this: I personally believe that the advantages conferred by it are not so much that the kids were in the program, but that the parents had enough interest in their education to enroll them in it in the first place.
Wikipedia says that there were about 25,000 Somalis in the entire state of Minnesota in 2013, while the Twin Cites have a population of over three million. So how can such a small group possibly “take over” such a large metropolitan area? There are probably far more people there who attended a live taping of Prairie Home Companion than Somalis in the area.
It stands to reason that whatever happens in the 18 hours kids aren’t in school will influence the 6 hours that they are in it (if they show up at all).
This approach seems analogous to as if a politician said, “Far more men than women are arrested for rape, and this is disproportionate, so let’s change the laws so that it is much more difficult to arrest a man for rape, thus making the arrest rates more equal,” and then rape rates skyrocketed.
When someone says that a problem is caused by not being able to admit the racist truth,that person is a racist themselves, and can be ignored the same way you’d ignorena murderer who says the problem is that we need to kill more people.
I don’t get why people keep entertaining these people. Racism is inherently detrimental to society, and any argument saying we should be able to be racist is thus bad for society. Racism is bad using first principles of harm and fairness. And is inherently false. There is no racist “truth” people are unwilling to say.
And, FYI, what Shodan described was racist policy, assuming he has not pet his own biases influence his telling of the story. It assumes people of color are inherently more likely to do criminal things.
I’m saying it’s an irrelevant characterization, because the race (or ethnicity, religion, national origin, or a slew of other characteristics that aren’t mentioned) of the students and their parents isn’t the root cause of the problem. The problem is that there are students that lack the ability or the desire (or both) to do well in an academic environment, usually because of problems at home, and parents that lack the ability or desire to be involved in their child’s education, again usually because of problems at home.
I’m sure you can correlate some school problems with certain racial groups, but anyone with a high school course in statistics can tell you that correlation does not equal causation. One of the common reasons that correlation does not equal causation is when a third variable causes both elements to increase or decrease. In this case the root cause of student problem is generally poverty (and the associated issues with malnutrition and a parent not having time to spend with their child due to working three jobs), crime in the area, drug issues, teen pregnancy, etc. That some urban schools have a large population with those attributes that happen to be black may be true, but it’s not their skin color causing the problems, it’s the community issues that cause those problems.
Now, the programs used to combat the issues of poverty, crime, etc, may need to be tailored to cultural differences, but it’s not the cultural or genetic differences that cause those issues in the first place.
My dad moonlighted as a substitute teacher from 1961 until about 10 years ago, and he always said that the wealthiest schools had the worst discipline problems; they just covered it up better. Schools with an average lower-income student base did have more violence (this post is deliberately race neutral) but the wealthy-school problems were more subtle.
The last few years, they would put him in the behavioral disorder classes, because in addition to being one of the few people who would do it, they knew he wouldn’t take any crap from those kids. He knew that most of them had been through things most of us cannot imagine, and also never felt like he was in imminent danger (which wasn’t true for regular classrooms), in addition to not being surprised to see some of those names show up on the police blotter, even as juveniles.
Name the policy, and it’s needed to be changed to accommodate Somalis, according to residents of the areas where they have been settled (I know of cities in Iowa and Kansas where the same thing has happened). They never had laws to follow in their homeland, and by all accounts, they have not assimilated well into our society.
:rolleyes: :eek: