My experience is that race and gender both make a big difference. White boys who act out are sent for diagnosis. They are medicated and, if needed, put in special education classrooms. They spend one on one time with the school psychiatrist and/or counselor and/or social worker. Steps are taken quickly to address the behavior in a positive fashion. Minority boys who act out are sent to the principal’s office, then detention, suspension and finally expelled. White girls who act out are ignored, and passed until graduation without doing much work (but are often NOT diagnosed). Minority girls are often failed in their coursework until it becomes obvious they won’t graduate.
Not saying that white boys are never expelled - but it takes a lot more to bad behavior before it happens.
You are trying, a little too cleverly I think, to get Correy El to jump into the briar bush of saying there are innate racial differences in academic ability. He is making the point that this obsession among academic reformers and policy makers is, and has been, mostly non-productive to date in terms of narrowing that gap.
Spending more (sometimes vast amounts in the case of the 100 million dollar Facebook-Camden experiment) on resources has been tried and it does not get you any substantive long term gains. If the problem is single mother underclass culture there is no weapon to attack that short of brutally draconian polices making that social position so painful that it becomes a non-viable choice for anyone and that’s not going to happen, nor should it happen. Possibly inventing a perfect, effortless to use long term contraceptive might be a solution but that is not on the near horizon.
He is saying to stop chasing that rabbit and focus on helping people do the best they can individually based on their own merits and help give them the tools and environment they need to do that. I get that you feel that until black and white academic performance is convergent there is work to be done. But if the needle has barely budged in 50 years maybe it’s time to think outside the box a little and stop obsessing about the differential performance of black vs white statistical cohorts and focus on just helping students do the best they can as individuals.
The truth is that we’re talking bout a multi-factorial problem. It’s not just single-headed female households and a fragmented community. It’s not just poverty and institutional racism and the soft bigotry of low expectations from educators who would rather work somewhere else. It’s not just chronic lead exposure combined with poor nutrition, unstable and decrepit housing, poor medical care, and inadequate mental health services. It is all of these things interacting with each other to produce a dysfunctional brain. And none of these things are “unsayable”, whatever the fuck that means. They just don’t lend themselves to moralizing and pontification.
In that environment, I was able to leverage my trained speech patterns, reaction patterns, and whatnot to establish an identity contrary to my surroundings: I was clearly a middle class person with a middle class future and should dammit be treated as such. It worked in many contexts. I got the social workers to work with me. And of course I knew what questions to ask, what to push for.
In America we discuss “class” as if it were coterminous with “monetary resources”. It isn’t. Not even here, it isn’t.
The OP is essentially saying the class characteristics of many public school students is why they don’t do well, except that the OP is not recognizing it as a class issue and is (or seems to be to be) blaming the people for their behavior as if their behavior were not as inculcated in them as middle class or upper class behavior is inculcated in those born to it.
These are bad cues in the school environment, in part because they are actively disruptive, but also in large part because they are socially viewed as “inappropriate”.
Class in a different sense. It’s also true of jobs. The kids from middle class families know how to behave as employees. That knowledge isn’t just out there like the air that we breathe. Kids from lower class environments aren’t generally being willfully self-destructive so much as they have not learned the situationally appropriate responses.
Did I mention that I was homeless? My responses were often not situationally appropriate. I did well in the social worker’s office because folks who train as social workers are generally middle class people. But on the waiting line for lunch or outside the facility in the early morning waiting for them to let us in? I said and did things that drew unfavorable attention to me from the other homeless. In many ways I didn’t know how to work the system, either. But in the long run I had better tools than those around me. I got my ass enrolled in college and qualified for every form of financial aid under the sun as a homeless person, and, because I knew how to study and stuff, nailed my first semester down solidly with good grades. Other people equally willing and interested in getting out had fewer opportunities than I did due to fewer social-class-related skills.
I wasn’t be clever or subtle. I very explicitly said that I feel there are two ways to see this problem. I said which one I feel is right. Correy El seems to be favoring the other one. So I asked him if he does.
You’re talking about helping people to do the best they can; that’s what I’m talking about. Where do you see a disagreement between our positions?
The problem with having a middle class mindset, is that it is difficult to understand that not everyone has a middle class mind set. I was raised lower middle class, we certainly did not have all the luxuries, but I never needed for anything, and I never felt financial stress as a child. I was well fed with nutritious food, was given vitamins to swallow down, had not just social, but academic relations even before entering kindergarten. By the time I entered school, I already knew how to behave, my mind and body were well nourished, I was not hungry, I was not stressed, I already had some basic counting and reading skills, as my parents had the free time, and were willing to work with me, I could focus on the job I was there for, to learn.
Those first few years of life are critical. If you are malnourished during this time, if you are not stimulated socially or academically, but instead, shuffled around as a nuisance from family member to family member or to crappy subsidized daycare that essentially puts you in a corner and tells you not to shit on yourself, in order for your single parent to work the 3 jobs she has to work in order to pay for rent and food and daycare, your performance when you get to school may not be quite as good.
I spent a few years as pretty poor, the 2008 recession was not good to me. I only worked 2 months in 2010. But, spending a few years poor is not nearly the same thing as growing up in it. I understood that I could work my way back out of my situation. I almost lost my house, but because I somehow convinced the bank that I was good for it, (definitely benefit from some white male middle class privilege there) I managed to keep it by the skin of my teeth. I did get to understand at the time though, that long term goes completely out the window when you don’t know if you will make it to tomorrow. Given my background I still kept the long term situation in mind, but it was a struggle to not give up and just do my best to survive day to day, and forget the consequences that tomorrow will bring.
When you never have the mindset in the first place that planning on and focusing on the long term will net you real benefits, then you never think about the long term. If your entire life is spent scrounging for the basic needs of survival, things as silly as academics are completely foreign to you, and expecting those with this mindset to then instill a respect for schooling into their children is unrealistic.
The solutions to the problem are complex, nuanced, and need to be reviewed to ensure that they are meeting the dynamic needs of an underserved population. The solution however, is not to turn our backs on the population cohort that society is failing. Blaming single mothers for not having time for their children because they work 3 jobs makes you feel good, in a visceral way, because it makes you feel superior to her, because the choices that you made did not lead you down this path, but it does no good to either the family in question, or society as a whole.
So the stresses of day to day survival swamp attempts to model or perform middle class behavior? If so how do immigrants many of whom start out as very financially stressed with initial underclass levels of income get their children to perform academically? Financial stresses do not (based on historical evidence) break functional cultures and injecting resources into dysfunctional cultures do not so all that much to improve them.
The point here is that you can financially scaffold a dysfunctional single mother underclass culture all you want, but if you do not or cannot change the attitudes and mindset that fuels that culture it’s not going to have any meaningful long term improvements. I get what you’re saying re middle class vs underclass assumptions, but the explanation that as long as they are poor and scrambling for survival nothing will or can change is belied by those cultures who do just that in one or two generations.
You can chicken and egg this scenario to death but in the end (IMO) it gets back to poor, single mother households. If you can’t fix a culture of single mother household, multi generational poverty and the bad decisions and attitudes that roll out of that lifestyle context there’s really no real world “fix” to academic performance. Throwing a lot of money at it has been tried and it does not work, or it only works a little as long as the money pump is kept open.
The person in question has not been provided any discernable reason for why they should model middle class behavior. Until they find themselves in the classroom, they have not been asked to perform middle class behavior and have had only minimal opportunity to observe it performed by others. To the limited extent they’ve been exposed to it in any shape way fashion or form, the majority of the people around them who have been available models may have expressed derogatory and dismissive attitudes towards those behaviors as bad adaptive behaviors. Which, in turn, may be a correct assessment for the majority of situations they find themselves in, insofar as they (the role models around them) are not coping with the classroom but with entirely other environments.
Marginalized people are often contemptuously dismissive of the value of “doing” classroom-appropriate behavior — they laugh at any of their peers who are foolish enough to believe that learning and performing those behaviors will genuinely get them anywhere. Some of that is insecurity based on their own individual clumsiness and lack of relevant learned skills for doing likewise (e.g., they can’t read very well) but some of it is fact-based assessment of future opportunities (which may be out of date or may be limited to certain contexts, but essentially they may be correctly observing that many of the folks from their environment who tried to make a go of it by being good in school still came out the other end insufficiently educated to compete in higher education or in the job market).
Oh, and don’t blame the single moms. The problem is not that it is a single mom household. The problem is that the same social clusters that tend to have a lot of single mom households are also prone to being marginalized from good educational and employment opportunities, and are prone to the perpetuation of a normative culture that values other things (other behaviors, and also other, more attainable goals).
They aren’t “bad decisions and attitudes” any more than the behaviors of a feral cat are not well-suited for life indoors on sofa cushions, nor the behaviors of a pampered blue point siamese for life in the alleys foraging from garbage cans. What they are is adaptive decisions and attitudes, appropriate for most of the environment in which they thrive but not for the strands of opportunities for getting the hell OUT of that environment.
Throwing a lot of money at the problem has not done much, but Head Start was a good program. The possibility of other good programs exists: funding child care, hiring from the environment where the single moms live (employs some of them to do the child care), making it available on a sliding scale that makes it useful for people contemplating entry-level employment, that sort of thing, could make quite a difference.
Immigrants worked their asses off to get here in the first place. They were looking for a better life. They may not know all the ins and outs of american society, but that have a plan. They could have stayed where they were, and been impoverished like the rest of their peers, instead, they made the choice that only a small minority of impoverished make, and left that situation for something better.
Of course they are then going to do their best to instill that sort of work ethic in their children, even if they don’t have academic knowledge to pass down.
Yes, there are exceptions to the cycle of poverty, but just because some make it out of that cycle does not mean that the cycle does not need to be addressed, as many do not make it out, and perpetuate the cycle anew.
Unless you are talking about a specific culture that wholly made it out of a cycle of poverty within a generation or two, in which case, I’m very interested.
I will agree that a poor single mother household is not an ideal place to raise a child. The mother does not have time to spend educating and socializing her kids, she is spending all of her time just trying to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. If her education is similar, then she will not be passing on knowledge or curiosity to her children. Throwing money at it is not going to work, obviously, as the money needs to be spent in productive ways. There is something to be said for financial support, so that the mother does not need to work 3 jobs at the same time as she tries to raise children, but that’s not enough. Having an uneducated and not overly responsible person, even if they have more time, spend time with their children is not going to make massive improvements. It really requires a comprehensive solution of pre-school all the way down to infancy, as well as school for parents, so that they are able to navigate the world better, and teach their children.
You call it a culture, as if it is the way they wish to be, but it’s more a culture in that it is the way they have been forced to be by societal influences. We need to remove those societal influences, before we can blame the victims of the same.
In your opinion, what societal influences cause such an increase of poor single mothers who work 3 jobs? And, in your opinion, how can those influences be removed?
It’s complicated, but lack of education on birth control, lack of education on the benefits of waiting to have children (if your mom had you in her teens, then why shouldn’t you have a kid in your teens?), and a criminal justice system that tends to criminalize and remove the fathers from the home. Many times, even if the father is not in jail, he still has a criminal record, so CPS or any other agencies in charge of providing benefits to the mother are not going to allow him to reside with his children.
I’ve never been a poor black single mother, but I have worked with quite a number of them over my years, and they are not any dumber or less able than the rest of us. I see the situation that they are in, the situation they were born into, grew up in, and are now trying their best to raise their own family in, as not stemming from their own bad choices, but instead, coming from them making the best choices they could given the lack of options available to them.
What to do about it is a comprehensive issue. Supporting the families that are there the best we can, doing what we can to prevent single women from having to raise a family by themselves, and taking a look at our criminal justice system to see if it is actually improving the lives of the community it serves, or is a (even if unintentional) tool of oppression. This is by no means comprehensive, like I said, it’s a complicated problem with no simple solutions that aren’t wrong.
And all of that is before we actually get to the point of getting the kids in school and educated.
Lack of education in birth control and family planning seems like an easy issue to solve. The criminal justice system? Not so much, so it seems almost futile to try to fix that in any sort of small timeframe.
The first two items are not really solutions. Support them how? Prevent it how?
I work, for five more days, in a failing school. We had an alternative school for several years and it made a big difference in improving classroom atmosphere. Later, we used in-school suspension as a preferred punishment for all but the most major offenses. It, too, was a great success. We don’t do those things anymore, for legal and financial reasons. So, the place is kept a madhouse by the assholes. I don’t have a fix for it, so I’m just retiring. Some days, it seems like there are people in government who want schools like this one to fail and do all in their power to make it happen.
Everyone keeps throwing around this “all the single mothers don’t have time to instill good values in their kids because they’re working 3 jobs” idea. I don’t know much about this issue, so maybe it’s true, but Cite?
You know, alot of that problem could be fixed if all the white liberals, the ones who CLAIM to not be racist, who love to claim they love black people and celebrate MLK and all, would put THEIR kids into those schools.
This is an issue I’ve had alot of fun with over the years when I am around an arrogant white liberal who puts me down as some sort of semi-klansmen when I point out that their kids attend majority white schools and why dont they put their kids where their mouth is.
I work around many single Mom’s on the night shift and I see and hear them all the time trying to parent over the phone “get in and do your spelling”, “go to bed”, “turn off the tv”.
But we work a late shift and its darn hard to get on to a day shift. Ok, they dont work 3 jobs technically but they work alot of overtime and 6th days for extra money.
Some of them have hearts of gold and I almost cry out for them.
I dont know about his situation but in ours, the in school suspension teacher was a separate paid position (with less pay than a regular teacher) and this position was often cut do to budgets. If not a separate position they relied on teachers to man that room but the problem there was a different teacher every hour with different attitudes towards it. Another was when the room was run by a substitute teacher.
Another problem is for the room to be effective, the kids had to get assignments from the teachers and some were better than others at sending down work. If no work, they get bored and cause trouble.
Lack of family planning is actually the harder part, as that is getting people to do things differently than they were taught o do them by their parents, and reinforced by the environment that they grew up in.
Criminal justice can be reformed by simply choosing to do it. It’s complicated, sure, but it is something that society directly controls, rather than the habits of particular cultures.
My previous post had a few of those solutions. I am not going to say I know all the answers, and it is something that much of society needs to tackle, not just a couple guys on an internet message board, but I would say one of the easiest and most effective things would be to provide comprehensive daycare and preschool. This frees up quite a bit of the financial and temporal stresses a single mother has, and puts the children into an environment where they can be better looked after, in terms of their nutritional, social, and educational development.
Providing financial support to the mothers so that they are not required be out of the home working so much would be of great use as well.
Will this fix everything? Maybe, but I doubt it. I do think that it will fix enough that we can start looking at other causes of the generational poverty, and start addressing those.
Anecdotal… And I have bias here, as pretty much all of my contact with single mothers has been as co-workers, so by definition they have at least one job.
I have very rarely met a single mother that did not have at least 2 jobs, and the majority have had 3. It is hard to get a single job that will work around a schedule that involves kids, and many lose one or more of their jobs anytime a kid gets sick and they have to take off work. If they only have on job, they are looking for a second, and even with two, they are still looking to pick up some hours somewhere.