I think I know why. At least in my high school, English was the only class where everyone was in the same grade. Math, science, even social studies–you’d have students in multiple grades and at multiple stages of development. But since you HAD to pass English to move on to the next grade, everyone was pretty much in the same grade in English class (though there was a senior in my freshman English class…still don’t know what that was about).
Word to what monstro said. Today, I hold two degrees, one from an Ivy League university, working on a third. I was always the highest-scoring kid on standardized tests in my class. Yet, in first grade, my wonderful teacher (I say this in all honesty, I thought and still think she was great) brought me, Nicole, and Sean to the back of the class one day. I thought she was going to tell us what amazing and smart kids we were. Instead she told us that we said some words incorrectly, most notably “ask.” We said “ax” instead. You should know that I started school in the UK, and even had an English accent to go with it. I’ve heard tapes of me as a kid and I’m fairly certain it sounded like “ahsk.” Nevertheless, she said she was going to send a letter to our parents and let them know that there were speech classes to help us enunciate better.
A letter never came, but I certainly had a complex about speaking and the word “ask” even today. But let’s let that slide for now. When I started at a new school as a ninth grader, the counselor placed me in consumer math, basic science, and basketball instead of my equivalent classes from my former school - algebra, biology, and ROTC. Granted, my new school didn’t have ROTC, but WTF? My mom went to the school, found the Black counselor, and told her what happened. She shook her head and said, “If he was in algebra and biology at his old school, he should be in those classes here.” The other counselor said that because I missed nine weeks of school, I would be too far behind to catch up in algebra. The Black counselor looked at my transcripts, my test scores, and said, “It’s going to be hard but you can catch up.” And I did. I actually was doing as well as lot of the kids in the class from the beginning of the year.
Those are the biggies but there are other examples I could share. Asa Hilliard and Jawanza Kunjufu have conducted research that points to the over-representation of African American boys in special education, and my own experience as a teacher reflects this reality. Several of the Black boys in my class (well, to be fair, all of my students but four were Black) had IEPs (individualized education plans, the document that details modifications needed by special education students). Supposedly, special education is supposed to work with students to “mainstream” them if possible. But at my school, if you were in special ed as a first grader, you’d likely be there as an eighth grader.
Why does it happen? Cultural misunderstandings, a lack of engagement with parents about what students need, and yes, I’m going to say it, racism all contribute to the issue. I knew teachers who would say, “Dejuan tries hard, but he is just behind the others, and I know he’s from Acres Homes.” WTF does that have to do with his academic progress?
Many of the parents of the students I taught worked during the day and had a very difficult time getting off work for conferences conducive to a teacher’s schedule. So I met with them on weekends, or late in the evening sometimes. In this way I could establish a rapport with them and prove that I was committed to their child’s education.
The problem is that teachers, underpaid and pulled in different directions, often don’t have the time or inclination to do this. So the parents are out of the loop and things just happen. Schools are often bureaucratic and hostile to parents who don’t have much education. Many parents are intimidated and trust what teachers say, without question. I found this to be true with my Latino students. I don’t ever remember a Latino parent ever challenging me about anything I told them about their children, their grades, or anything. Black parents were more likely to ask (respectfully) why I thought their child needed to come to Saturday school, how their grade dropped from the last period, that sort of thing. But I also know that many teachers never met or heard from their parents.
Folks, there are a number of potential explanations for the OP, but I would be shocked if they are not based in class-based or race-based stereotyping and low expectations for students of color to some extent. I would like to think that racism and classism are on the wane in US society, but I think that’s a naive position to take.
chappachula, I don’t think you understand the disparity in access to information that students have. I’m a first-generation collegian, and I only had a vague idea of what the point of my AP English class was, even after talking with my friends. My counselor was worthless and didn’t give two shits what we did, as long as we stayed out of her office. Some students have parents who are college-educated, and it’s likely that some may have college coaches helping them apply to schools. Beyond that, sometimes information is being withheld from parents and students by some of the more knowledgeable parents - they see it as a competition to get their son or daughter in a good school, and helping anyone else is hurting their kid’s chances.
There’s a ton of research that suggests that the FAFSA (the federal form for financial aid) is intimidating to low income parents, and many don’t complete the form because they don’t understand why their tax returns are need, or the form is complicated. (My last FAFSA two years ago was computerized, but again, not everyone has access to the internet.) The college application and financial aid process is incredibly difficult and filled with red tape, and if you compound this with the fact that parents are often balancing work, raising other children, and navigating a language barrier - as is the kid - it isn’t easy to see how this information can fall through the cracks.
I didn’t say that my school doesn’t have racist individuals, in fact one of the teachers (herself a minority female) I work with is a major racist and sexist. I was simply pointing out an explanation that many teachers (including myself) have offered as to why the CAT6 scores for our minority student are not growing as fast as the white students.
Oh and I have to pay attention because I teach special education and many of my students are second language learner and minorities so my students have a triple threat of facing discrimination based on their disabilities, language differences, AND race.
Well, “English” doesn’t just mean the English language-most of the time, it’s short for English lit. The point is, he didn’t have enough credits of the SUBJECT, not that he didn’t know English. I would imagine that ESL, where you’re learning how to speak and write and read English (or at least, perfect it) is a hell of a lot different from an English lit class, where you’re studying Shakespeare, Chaucer, Steinbeck, and Hawthorne.
As for college requirements, I can’t say. And I’m afraid that my school was probably about 90-95% white, so I can’t comment on the difference in treatment for various ethnicities. I was only commenting on how class credits are weighted.
In the case of sven’s example, it’s probably a question of incompetance, as much as it is racism.
I’m still confused by the “ESL classes don’t qualify for admission to college.” A fair number of students at my alma mater, a public university in California, are immigrants who took ESL courses in lieu of the so-called standard English courses.
Who can figure out University policies? When I went back to school for my masters’ degree, I had to pass an Written English test. It could only be waived if I passed the CBEST (a basic math and English test for California teachers). Great I (naively) thought. I submitted my scores but was informed that the test would not be waived. Why? I was in the College of Natural & Social Sciences and the CBEST was only used to waive the test for students in the College of Education.
Yes, but they wern’t incompetent to me. It was hard, and there were a lot of roadblocks, but ultimately they got me to college. I am not one bit brighter, harder working, or even richer and more likeable than so many of my friends who did not get that chance. They just happen to be a lot more incompetent whenever an immigrant was involved. The school was broken in a lot of ways, but for the large part it was more broken for immigrants than for white kids. Mostly they “found a way” for the “honors” kids- and the "honors’ kids were largely the white kids.
Thats racism.
I think part of this is definitely cultural. One of my ex-girlfriends is Haitian, born there but raised mostly in New York up until middle school. She went to a school that was about equally split between blacks and whites, with a decent percentage of hispanics thrown into the mix. Because she’s bright she was placed in an advanced program for her core classes. Among the blacks in that program, a majority of them were not mainland blacks; they were usually of islander extraction. She told me that most Jamaicans and Haitians in her experience looked down on the mainland blacks because, “they don’t work hard.”
Despite being black, and poor, and a non-native speaker of English (she spoke nothing but Creole until grade school) she was the second person in her family to go to college; her step-father has a Bachelor’s degree. Her mother’s generation mostly could not go to college because they were recent immigrants, but they all valued education. All of them speak standard French in addition to Creole, for instance. That value for education and the will to work at it makes a difference. Her circumstances were substantially the same as the other blacks, but her upbringing provided more impetus for success.
It’s a cycle. How can the African-American community make education a major value (and of course for plenty of African-Americans it is) when education has done nothing but fail them? They get the worst schools. Then when they do get to school, they are automtically placed in the lowest tracks and are treated with the least respect. No amount of education will keep an eighteen year old Black kid from being followed around by security when he goes shopping. Everyone automatically assumes the worst of Black teenagers. Look at this- even other Black people assume they “don’t work hard”. At every turn the education system tells them they arn’t worth it, they can’t do it, and it’s not worth trying. And then when they fail, we say it’s their own fault for being “lazy” and having “bad values”.
And somehow we expect the lesson for African-American kids to learn from all this is “work hard and get an education and everything will be great!”. People only learn what they see in their lives.
Come down to Oakland one day. I’ll show you two schools- one predominately White, and one predomintely Black. And then try to tell me that our schools are serving Blacks as well as Whites.
This is actually a good thing in a way. I agree that the requirements need some tweaking and that it is ridiculous that an ESL class isn’t accepted when they are later performing at a normal or advanced level in regular classes. Something needs to change there. But I live and teach in a country where almost the only requirement for getting into a university is a single test, and believe me, it’s not a good thing. The only thing the kids and the parents care about is passing that test.
Functional English ability? Don’t need it. Teach them what they need for the test. Critical thinking skills? Are those needed for the test? Nope? Don’t need 'em. Problem-solving? Only as much as they need for finding the right answers on the test, they need time for memorizing facts and figures after all. Logic? Do they test that?
Counting what you do over four years of high school, as is done in most of the US at present, gives a much better picture of what kind of a student you are. If you screw up during part of a year, you have a lot of time to show that you are capable of better than that. Counting your progress over the whole of high school shows whether or not you can handle long-term goals and doing some amount of donkey work, traits which will be important in the post-education world too.
In Japan, their “character,” as shown by not getting in trouble and acting appropriately, showing up to their semi-mandatory club activities on time, and “doing their best,” are the most important things. Grades don’t matter that much. Tests are almost the only basis for grading in high school anyway, and a 30% in most schools is a passing score. They get lots and lots of practice taking tests, which is why their standardized test scores are the highest in the world, but the average student can’t think for shit.
There’s a reason why Japan produces very few Nobel Prizes in the sciences, and what few Prize winners they have produced study outside Japan and almost always do their work as a part of a team of scientists. The sad thing is that these people are the extraordinary ones, and with few exceptions they can’t do anything of consequence in a system like Japan’s.
If you want well-educated and well-rounded students who are capable of thinking instead of just parroting back memorized information, you do not want tests to be the only standard of evaluation.
My experience, and that of my siblings, has been similar to Monstro’s and Hippy Hollow’s. We scored anywhere from the top ten percent to the top one percent on standardized tests, from elementary school onwards.
The teachers and guidance counselors would put us in middle or lower level classes, rather than the top level classes that our scores merited. At the same time, white kids from our neighborhood, kids that we knew were just not bright, were admitted to these same classes automatically. (They weren’t always happy about this - they had to struggle to keep up.)
Our parents, with several advanced degrees between them, would go see the teachers and counselors. At first these school officials would resist, pulling absurd arguments out of their asses. Then they would relent, because the evidence of the test scores was irrefutable.
Based on reports I’ve read, this kind of thing happens often. Studies on racial tracking in a given school invariably find some black kids who should be in upper level classes by virtue of test scores, but are placed in lower level classes anyway.
You’ll never convince me that this isn’t about race. Then again, I’ll never convince many of you that it is about race.
I’ve also read stories about school systems in all white areas, where super bright kids are denied access to upper level classes and other resources because they come from the poor part of town, their parents are truckers, slaughterhouse workers, trailer park residents. Though I’ve had no direct experience of this, I’m sure it goes on also.
The latter pheonomen doesn’t excuse the former. As you would imagine, I think the former phenomenon is more damaging and more pernicious.
And people still ask me why my kids are in private school. Just last night at an AYSO soccer team meeting, a friend was asking about school choices (our boys are both 5 going on 6). Her husband is leaning towards private school, but she thinks public is a better choice. After all, CA public schools are some of the best, right?
Um, no. We spend 1/2 to 1/3 of what other states spend per student. Our system is in the toilet. We granted emergency credentials to people who don’t belong anywhere near a classroom because they haven’t ever been properly trained.
And how can parents blame counselors for their kids’ failures? Try knowing what the hell goes on at your kid’s school, and what classes they are taking. If a counselor has a student load of 250 kids, s/he will be lucky to learn 25 kids’ names, let alone map out your kid’s college and career for you.
Parents who want to pass on all responsibility to the school are fools.
And back to the “brilliant” Brazilian kid- a brilliant kid would be more aware of his options, I think. High school campuses are covered with college information, testing requirements and kids who talk about college a lot. Hell, when I graduated in 1985, I don’t think the SATs were optional- everybody took 'em, white, hispanic, asian, whoever. We all got lectures, etc, about college options, entry requirements, etc. I think this particular anecdote has been embellished somewhere, either in the brilliance of the kid or the fucked-up-edness of the system.
Depends on where in California the school is. Some are fairly good and some are disasters.
It is possible, of course, that it is exactly the same phenomenon, in which the counselors are responding to perceived class (rather than race) and that ethnic appearance is simply one prominent indicator of class (in the uninformed opinions of the counselors).
(Apparently, in elementary school I gave off an aura of “lower class.” My first grade teacher put me into the slow group until the first teacher conference when my Mom mentioned that Dad was an engineer and I suddenly moved up without doing anything different in class. I had a similar experience around eighth grade until one of the standardized tests came back and I had tied with the two “smart” girls in the class for the highest score.)
I was sent to a special ed. counselor for speech therapy becase I had an orthodontic device known as a “Frankel appliance” taking up most of my mouth. I kid you not. I looked like a nut-foraging chipmunk with the thing in place, and spoke like I had a spit-soaked rag under my tongue for the first couple of weeks before getting used to it. Prior to wearing the appliance, my speech was completely unimpaired, and I was one of the few kids in my class without a distinct Maine accent, something some of my teachers actually commented on. When I showed the mass of metal and plastic to the counselor, she turned ashen, and instructed me to show one of my teachers what I had just shown her.
Some public school teachers and administrators aren’t all that conscientious and/or bright, I’m afraid. I’d hate to let some of them off with the stupidity defense, but it can’t be ruled out in all instances.
Any school system is going to have parents that do not get involved in- and in fact may be obsticles to- their kids’ education. These parents may be working several jobs, sick, mentally disabled, drug addicted, crazy, alcoholic, non-English speaking, unaware that school officials arn’t going to turn them in to the INS, lazy, religious nuts, homeless, unable to leave the house due to abusive family members, abusive themselves…whatever. It happens.
These kids STILL should not get any less of an education than anyone else. These kids should STILL be encouraged to reach the highest heights they an.
The Brazillian kid was my ex-boyfriend. He was a year or two older than me and we were dating in my senior year of high school, right as I was getting ready to go to college. Thats how he found out that being poor didn’t exclude him from college. His parents were part of a very strict religious sect and didn’t associate with any outsiders- and 99% if their church were recent immigrants without much of an understanding of the United States. They literally believe that the end of the world is coming within the next couple years, and if they ever thought about college they’d probably disapprove of it. His social group in classes were largly the other South Americans, who were unfortunatly mostly drug dealers and their everyday world involved prison and police and their relations to various gangs in and outside of North America- not college. Even though he went to school and did well in his classes, socially he was just in a sort of parrellel universe where not a lot of information about the normal world could reach him.
And, like I said, the assumption was that any kids heading to college (which was a small percentage of the population) would be in the honors classes. So college necessities were addressed in the honor’s English classes. The main concerns of the regular classes was keeping the kids in school- we had about a 30% drop out rate. If they talked about tests, the ASVAB would be more appropriate. The only people present at our “career fair” were trade schools and a large military presense. College just wasn’t a part of our school’s culture except in the honors cloisters. And since his only “advanced” class was calculus (which you can get in to without any special placement- it’s the automatic 4th year math class) he missed out on the college bound honors culture. His calculus teacher probably assumed he was already in the honors track (since most people didn’t take a 4th year of math) and didn’t think to tell him he was exceptional.
I’m sorry to kind of drag this on a tangent, but I also noticed a difference in treatment of the sexes, as well as races, in high school.
By which I mean, if a male student wasn’t doing very well, he’d be pulled aside and told something like “I notice you’re not attending/failing out of these classes. Did you know about these alternative schools/co-op programs/trade programs at school? They can help you graduate while learning a trade/computer skills/etc/”
Whereas, if a female student wasn’t doing as well, it would more often be, “I noticed you’re not attending/failing out of these classes. Is something going on at home? Are your parents seperated/divorced? Did you know about our afterschool tutoring program/easy Math program/easy English program?”. The only time you really heard about alternative schooling for girls was the GAP program, which was a place for high school girls who got knocked up to continue or finish high school.
I’ve never really understood why the girls were first told about extra school help, while the boys were given options other than your basic public education. I don’t think it was “Girls won’t be interested in trades” or anything, but it felt like “Boys who aren’t doing well won’t do well ever, but girls who aren’t doing well just need a little help to get on the right track”.
Did anyone else have similar experiences in high school?