Half of Black High School Students in the Bay Area Can Barely Read
darrellowens.substack.com
darrellowens.substack.com
- Shortage of dedicated special education teachers
- Parents who won't discipline kids at home
- Top-down pushes from administration such as "restorative justice", "least restrictive environment", and a few other phrases that will make any classroom teacher's skin crawl
- Unwillingness from administration to apply suspensions or expulsion due to how this ties to school funding
- Lack of flexibility in the teaching job market due to teachers being a licensed profession and most states suspending a teacher's license if they quit mid-year, leaving apathetic teachers trapped in bad schools
- Attempts to discipline non-white students frequently resulting in accusations of racism, making it not worth the trouble
In the classroom, the end result seems to be that behavior meltdowns take up a disproportionate amount of a teacher's attention and they aren't empowered to deal with it, all at the expense of the quality of instruction for the rest of the students. The standardized test score metrics discussed here are a not too surprising consequence.
This sort of culture now is unfortunately getting common, in the era of 'getting cancelled' nobody wants to carry the burden of helping others. Everybody is just one hair trigger away from hurting other people's emotions despite their best intentions to help.
What makes things more complicated is receiving help in many ways demands being humbled by the helper. This itself can be humiliating to go through. It could be misunderstood in a million different ways. And then you become the bad guy for helping and they become victims for receiving help. You lose in every possible way. Not only do you have to spend your time, energy and money to help them. You have also to risk getting cancelled for no fault of yours. And if you get cancelled, you are sanctioned for life.
For this reason its not just the classroom or office mentorship, people today as little as don't bother telling a person their wallet dropped from their pockets in a bus, out of fear it could be construed as harassment.
>>making it not worth the trouble
This is where you arrive.
Imagine if Apple made you sign a non-compete to the effect of "I agree to never quit between August and June, with the punishment if I do being that I'm no longer allowed to develop software for anyone." That'd basically be indentured servitude and wouldn't last a minute in court. So why do we let public schools get away with it?
SF teachers have been having a terrible time in the last 5 years because SFUSD has been run by progressive extremists that wanted to spend $2 million changing school names instead of worrying about things like Black literacy. Somehow they think changing school names are better for Black students than actually getting them to read. And meanwhile SF teachers haven't been getting paid on time this year because of complete mess of their payroll system, which is forcing drastic action that puts the SFUSD in deeper financial trouble.
I would hate to see Republicans get into power here, not especially because California Republicans are dumb as rocks, but I don't know what else will wake these California Democrats up. If Newsom has any aspirations to be president, and it certainly seems that way, I can guarantee you that running ads showing what LA and SF look like after decades of Democratic rule will destroy any chances of California Dems getting a modicum of power anywhere else in the country.
If you don't pay for talent, you ain't getting it.
This is a negative feedback loop and there's no way out of it.
The entire political scene of SF and California dictate the makeup of SFUSD so I think it goes hand in hand. I think the fact that moderate centrists finally showed up to vote out the SFUSD board members and Boudin are an indication of what comes over the next few years. I hope the progressive extremists get kicked out of the Dems and get replaced by moderate centrists like what we've seen in the last year.
The OP talked about wasting $2 million on renaming schools over perceived injustice (the plan to rename Lincoln was probably the worst idea they've ever perpetuated). You can't point back to underfunding when the school is wasting funding on extremists
A lot of right wingers like to say “see look what libs do!” but I’ve lived in very blue cities like Boston that seem to be significantly better run. San Francisco just seems peculiarly dysfunctional in its own unique way.
My personal view on this is that it's really underappreciated how self-perpetuating something like this is. I learned to read at a fairly early age and I attribute that to my mom reading to me on a nightly basis. Having someone verbalize something while you follow along just makes it so much easier to grok once you start doing it on your own. The kids referred to in this article will have parents who were the inspiration for the Ebonics idea. How many of them would have read to their kids every night?
Teachers don’t want to teach at the predominantly black schools (regardless of their own race). Violence, poverty, little to no parent engagement. When they have school conferences that half of the district teachers don’t have anything to do while the other half has parents lined up in the halls.
And if there is parent engagement it is sometimes not positive.
At one point the schools were accused of not providing enough support. More recently the sentiment is that too many black kids are identified as needing special education/ support… so now they are scared to provide / assign those services.
I don’t know what the solutions are. It’s complex, it’s hard.
There are reasons for all sorts of the individual issues, but as a whole they all feed into each other and the mountain of issues seem insurmountable.
Also - genuine question for anyone with a clue - what percent of high school age kids do you think have smartphones in, say, East Oakland?
Answer: Effectively all of them. Source: worked in inner city schools for a bit in areas at least as poor as East Oakland.
I know of almost nobody else who does this. Shorthand is encouraged, acronyms abound, nobody actually gives a shit if you misspell something, punctuation is thrown to the wind with reckless abandon.
I don't see how texting could put an end to illiteracy. If anything, it promotes it.
Slightly provocative question, given what you've said ("without abbreviating anything"), would you actually spell out the acronym RSVP in a formal invitation? It's very common eg in Britain, it's definitely considered good form, and spelling it out would just cause confusion since it's actually a French term that most people probably wouldn't recognize (répondez, s'il vous plaît). What about i.e. (ita est)? E.g. (exemplum gratum, although some might argue it can also stand for example given)? You might say you just avoid those terms, which is possible, but I have a suspicion that you're just fooling yourself. Since you're on this site, I might also ask whether you always spell out the Domain Name System (DNS) and similar terms? If you did, you'd actually make your messages less understandable to most audiences, detracting from your literacy I'd argue.
[0] My opinion here, I'm not a linguist, so if this clashes with established definitions of literacy, my apologies.
Edit: I actually had a look, and of course you are fooling yourself. According to your comment history, you actually use abbreviations all the time, including ones that are unknown to me (ITAD company, SEE), making whatever point you were trying to make lost on me without research effort: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35273712#35276691
Edit: You took my comment too literally and missed the overall point. I didn't even intend to judge those who don't text like I do, hence my highlighting that it's not a conscious effort on my part. And, yes, I suppose that quite common acronyms are fine - I had hoped that it was obvious that I was referring to less common acronyms, but perhaps failed there (and still may be with this comment, c'est la vie). But thanks for kinda painting me like a grammar snob?
Edit 2: Some other words for clarification, since I guess I'd better be extra careful...
Just a guess, people used to be able to get by with a very basic level of literacy, i.e. label recognition. My cousin was this way when he finished school ~20 years ago.
Now you can't get by like that very easily because text based communication is so prevalent. If you have friends they'll be texting you, so you're pretty much forced into a learning situation for sociality, whereas in the past that was only happening at the speech level.
Re the shorthand stuff, (a) you probably just didn't realise how illiterate people were in the past because they couldn't write anything for you to read, so it's a genuine step up. (b) I actually encounter that shorthand less now, and more from adults who grew up with expensive and limited SMS.
Literacy attained.
Agreed that reading and writing are two different skills.
Of course, the question is whether that language is as expressive as ‘old English’.
I would guess it is simpler, but on the other hand, I know almost nothing of that language, and I know for sure it has features I can’t read, such as most expressions made up of multiple emoticons
The nuance is that most can read, but not "at their age level"
Quote:
> In 2021, 47% of Black students in SFUSD that are high school juniors don’t even come close to meeting English-language proficiency. [...] That means for every one of two Black students leaving San Francisco high schools they can’t read for their age.
I wonder what percentage are learning English as a 2nd language.
The problem I see with using "black" as a descriptor is there are recent African immigrants, 1+ gen. African immigrants, Afro latinos, descendants of enslaved Americans, etc... put under one umbrella.
How can anyone pinpoint why a % of "black" students have reading issues at similar rates to hispanic students when the statistics pool black people from vastly different backgrounds together?
I have no idea how things stack in the Bay Area, but I figure that answers your question and implies your nuance likely wouldn't change anything.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/04/09/a-risin...
Yes, when I saw that it was clear to me that being "foreign born" said very little about the population. For example, English can still be a 2nd or 3rd language for recent immigrants with US born children, especially in California and Texas.
>I figure that answers your question and implies your nuance likely wouldn't change anything.
I disagree, immigrants are most likely unevenly distributed.
That said, you could probably hunt for some school-level stats in the bay area and make an educated guess.
I misread, thanks for clarifying.
(Anecdotally, almost everyone I know who texts like this is very well educated and absolutely capable of writing in full, grammatical sentences — they just choose not to in these situations.)
Plus, texting has always featured slang, abbreviations, lack of punctuation, shortened spelling, etc. Not the best to learn from, perhaps.
If the only reading is app button labels, slang tweet burns, or media approved slogans of the week, why would you expect them to develop any meaningful vocabulary?
communicate through emoji and stickers?
The same people that supposedly care about minorities and other "disadvantaged" populations are they ones who are dooming them.
Says it's likely black American cultural, parent involvement is huge, etc. Hard problems to solve.
But solutions such as reparations, segregated schools, and the forced hiring of kids by local companies to hire based on skin color seem way off the mark to actually achieving those goals.
Kids spend 7 or 8 hours a day in schools, with supposedly the goal of educating children. How can they keep failing so badly? If my job was to build houses, and I only ever built half of it adequately, with the rest in disrepair, I'd be fired. Same with about any job. Except educators, for some reason?
And teachers complain it's not their fault, they don't have the tools, they are forced to pass kids along, etc. So who's to blame? Burn the system to the ground, fire the administrators, and let's try again. Because finger pointing isn't helpful.
We really, really need to look at our failing education systems first. Having outside resources lead to way better educational outcomes tells me that schools aren't doing their primary objective, at all.
Learning happens at home. Parents or guardians are the answer (or origination) to this problem.
I might be out on a limb, but if you are posting on this site, you were likely reading before you started kindergarten or soon thereafter. Your parents most likely taught you to read.
Research shows that kids that aren’t reading by third grade are not likely to ever really learn to read.
So many politicians are former school administrators. It's a problem.
The claim is absurd because of an anecdote that goes against the evidence?
All statements like this need credible qualification with statistics and demographics to be meaningful.
Amazing the sort of things it's okay (and always has been okay) to say about Black people but laws are being passed to protect the feelings of whites.
The bureaucrats and tenured academics who have doubled down on this approach should be punished.
On the 'cultural expectations' front, rural white America has some similar issues to urban black America, of the 'why do you want to go to college' or 'being good at math is for nerds' or 'take your nose out of the books and play more sports' variety.
My own rather jaded cynical view is that this is a setup deliberately engineered by the ruling class, as if everyone could do math well nobody would ever have bought subprime-adjustable-rate mortgage loans, as they'd have realized they'd be better off just saving money by renting until they could afford a fixed-rate loan. The ability to estimate probabilities and to calculate compound interest should be required skills for high-school graduates.
An ignorant population is more easily fleeced - and let's not forget why it was a crime to teach slaves to read and write in the Old South, either. The recent attempts to lower math standards for high school students in California are probably motivated by that kind of agenda.
I don't mean to direct my ire at you personally, but I frankly find it frustrating the degree to which the rich tech class gets fresh wind of this every few weeks, says "gee whiz something should be done!" and then continues scrolling their feed. Public school teachers have been crying and screaming about widespread societal failure for literally decades now.
There it is
This sounds so ridiculous that I don't even know how to comment. Does the Federal government even have that much money (I know the Fed can print) to give that kind of money?
As per https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/03/25/the-gro..., "46.8 million people in the U.S. identified their race as Black". Taking 5M for each, you get 234T USD.
Where is that money going to come from?
> What would a proper amount look like?
A proper amount would have to be mathematically feasible to not be ridiculous. The policy implications of any such feasible plan are nuanced and might or might not make sense. 234T USD does not make sense though.
Yep, it sure sounds like a lot. Maybe a bit too high, but I'll note your argument was that its too much, not that it is an injustice to others.
I wonder how much of the $145T total wealth[0] in the US, or $463T in the world, would be owned by the 46.8 million people in event that their ancestors hadn't been enslaved, had their culture and homes forcibly removed or destroyed, or lost generations of social configuration through slavery, disenfranchisement, and Jim Crow.
Pretty large moral quandary, knowing most Americans (and, to be fair, most people in the world) have their wealth and security built not by their personal ingenuity but by the exploitation of the labor of others. Maybe not quite as distressful as confronting the Absurd, but still pretty big.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_wea...
I would be very interested to know why did you find the 5M number reasonable. Did you think it was feasible? Since you include the World wealth in your argument above, do you think some kind of wealth transfer from the whole world to the 46.8 million people is a sensible option? Why?
My comments on US and total wealth were generally noting that wealth is typically built by exploitation, either of someone's labor or of resources they or their progenitors took by force.
Maybe I'm over thinking this, but the public education curriculum in major cities seem to have strayed far from making sure that every child is drilled in the basics: Basic reading, writing, and mathematics.
Large class sizes with underpaid teachers asked to play babysitter, teacher, and test prep tutor, all while being given no flexibility in approach or real ability to discipline are all major issues.
Administration that won't support teacher decisions and will push back if teachers actually try to fail students even if they don't turn in anything leaves this as an inevitable outcome.
Outside of voting for local and federal officials who actually want to solve this, how can I help?
The rich kids get tutors. The poor ones don’t.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2021/11/21/proble...
There are enough people who can read "at their age level". We'll make do with those (and with ChatGPT - a "just-in-time technology if I've ever seen one!).
2. Ime, education in phonics honestly sucks and fails to take into account local and regional dialectic differences. Maybe treating AAVE (and other regional dialects, similar issues exist among White Appalachians in rural WV, TN, and KY for example due to the Scotch-Irish heavy register) as a second language might help bridge the gap.
Clarence Thomas is an example of that kind of issue - his first language was Gullah (a mixed creole between West African languages and English) and it has had an impact on his own education earlier in his career.
The last sentence missing a word.
One could argue the abbreviated words are also an indication.
That is absolutely untrue. Lowell High School in SF spends a lot less than other high schools. Same with Stuyvesant in NYC. This means the kids falling behind get more resources.
Your proposal will result in higher spending, not lower.