A 13-year-old's slavery analogy raises some uncomfortable truths in school
good.is
good.is
Why? Real life is often the best instructor (as kaonashi put it "kids have a really easy time seeing things that are self-evident").
I remember being just a little younger than this girl (I'm black) and learning about the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Civil Rights Movement and declaring to my parents "hey, racism is over!" Not long after, I was stopped by a security guard and accused of stealing the candy bar I had just paid for 30 seconds earlier. I'd bet dollars to donuts that girl has similar stories, and it should surprise no one that she might see a correlation between her skin color and the actions of others (even if those correlations aren't true).
If you move to a more affluent school district you'll find better student-teacher ratios, more dedicated teachers, and better teaching. And, wonder of wonders, you'll find a lot more white kids in those classes.
What is actually being punished here is poverty, not race. However poverty is correlated with race. And the school system is perpetuating that cycle. Worse yet when colored students come from schools where nobody has the skills they theoretically should for their grade, then people in the general public learn that people of color lack those skills regardless of what is on the transcript. And the result of that is that white kids in her class are more likely to be given chances by employers later in life, while non-whites at good schools are going to be treated with suspicion. This helps close the loop, and keeps poverty nicely correlated with race.
The only way to fix this is to insist that, no matter what your race, you have to actually achieve to the same level to get the same credentials. And to resolve the historic bias by funneling substantially higher resources towards at risk folks in poor neighborhoods. But this is incredibly expensive. Republicans would never willingly channel that much money towards people that they do not like. And Democrats would not be up in arms if we had to go into schools like this one and tell 85% of the kids, "Sorry, you've been told you're in grade 8 but you have to go back to grade 3 and relearn what the broken schools failed to teach you."
The education system is flawed, but it's also dealt a shitty hand where it's expected to be day care for teens as well.
Edit: Really the only story here is how the school handled it. It seems very he said, she said though...
[1]: http://www.good.is/post/new-report-puts-the-black-male-achie... [2]: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2009455.as...
This is because black students, on average, are less intelligent than white students. Mystery solved.
Big classes are also everywhere, just like multiple-choice questions.
The notion that students in black-majority schools don't do well because of "white racism", and not because of the constant blame game those schools play that never allows anyone but the whites to take the blame is ridiculous.
An interesting video I came across ("Look In The Mirror") a while ago --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S9PM5Xo0i4
Her teachers responded in the poorest way possible, but I can see why: they were just accused not only of being giant failures at their jobs, but also of failing deliberately for the sake of racism. Even if we swapped "race" with "class" here, her comments are still inflammatory, unsubstantiated, and shockingly mean-spirited/cruel coming from a 13 year-old.
If I were at the receiving end of that kind of accusation, I'd be pretty pissed.
There are more than enough instances of deliberate and willful racism in this country that we really shouldn't have to grasp at straws like this.
It's probably not cool to tag the result of the essay, and by extension, the girl, as "cruel", etc. You're just short of blaming the victim. And the discount is based on a technicality.
Analyzing the output of a black box delivering some awful result: If the same result could be delivered for some range of inputs, they're all effectively equal. And as the recipient of that result, a person is well-served to point out the equivalence. More to the point, it's eminently fair to make this observation in public. This I understand to be more than minimally in keeping with freedom of speech.
Saying that you believe that there are plenty of real issues in the country is not a pretext for dismissing, nor does it provide some kind of legitimacy to a dismissal of the case the child made.
How am I blaming the victim? Is she actually the victim of a cabal of racist teachers who are deliberately and willfully exercising a racist policy of keeping minorities uneducated?
The problem here isn't that she has pointed out the many structural problems infecting the US public education system, it's that she didn't, and instead she pointed at her own teachers as her direct, deliberate, and willful oppressors - which is patently incorrect.
The problem here is I think some people like yourself are reading her essay as "The quality of the public education system in minority-heavy areas of the US is shockingly bad and perpetuates the economic and social disparity between white America and everyone else, and this continuing disparity is very much racism in action". That's entirely a valid observation and completely fair to point out.
Instead her essay was "The bad quality of the education I have personally received is a consequence of a direct and willful conspiracy by my immediate teachers to oppress minorities and withhold education from them."
These are two entirely different arguments. If she had actually made the former argument I'd be cheering her on the entire way, but no, she went way off the rails and proceeding to heap incredulous accusations on quite possibly the only people in the system who could possibly have an interest in ameliorating the broken system.
It's controversial because some people will take the results and skew the findings to fit their pov without taking into account some of the background. On the other hand, amongst 'native' blacks there can appear a class divide as well http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.pitts/ogbu_theory_
In a kind of related story, professional, rich black parents wanted to find out why their children seemed to be underperforming vis a vis their parents' expectations. http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/rich-black-flunking/Conten...
The conclusions are a bit controversial.
Do you have any examples of such schools? And of comparative studies showing that they fail?
Because this claim looks like a convenient urban legend.
I don't believe white teachers are somehow incapable of teaching black students, but what you state here just isn't true. Harlem Children Zone is a good example of a school that has successfully bridged the academic gap between their students and their more privileged counterparts(from any race).
Absolute strawman. The black "leaders" he calls out have been calling out the black "community" for self-inflicted ills for decades, ranging from misogyny and violence in hip-hop, to homophobia. Not to mention there are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of black-led organizations all over the country where folks are spending their own money to encourage parental participation in education and address other ills - this is the stuff the media for whatever reason doesn't like to cover (I've been to press conferences given by these folks who try to get the word out on their activities, to have no one show up).
As for why they don't march for black-on-black crime, I'll just leave this here: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/why-dont...
Where are all these places where lighter skinned people have to take all of the blame for everything and everyone else gets a free ride? I hear people complain about these places all the time, but as yet I have not been able to locate one.
As a result, she continued, not much has changed since the time of Douglass, "just different people, different era" and "the same old discrimination still resides in the hearts of the white man." Williams called for her fellow students to "start making these white teachers accountable for instructing you" and challenged teachers to do their jobs. "What merit is there," she asked, if teachers have knowledge and are "not willing to share because of the color of my skin?"
She also should do some research on how parental involvement affects education. The school isn't going to be able provide an education if the students (or their parents) aren't equally involved. Nobody gives you an education. This gets into more complex issues such as families that have to work multiple jobs and don't have time, single parents who are overloaded with work, generations who have been conditioned to dislike education, etc. Teachers are not all paid that well and it's not too hard to see them loose their passion of they feel like their work isn't even appreciated.
The school reacted terribly as well. I know nothing about the school but if it is really that bad then hopefully the parents will get involved and start demanding better education for their kids.
On the other hand, there were plenty of folk who would swear up was down if they thought it made the world fit their personal narrative better. You haven't have seen any of those people about by any chance, have you?
I'm as white as you can possibly be (according to 23andme) and I experienced the same thing. Lazy teachers that just show up and hand out worksheets. Of course, they would give a very carefully prepared lecture on the day that the principal would sit in on their class, but then the next day they were right back to handing out worksheets.
I don't know what the solution is, but the problem is lazy teachers who do a bad job (or a combination of some that are lazy and others that are unqualified). The motivation isn't racism, but I would agree that black students are more likely to be stuck with bad teachers. Black schools tend to be less desirable to work at, worse facilities, worse funding, worse behavioral problems among students (it's a vicious cycle), parents who don't get involved (again, vicious cycle. How can you help build a school that works when you have no firsthand experience with a school that works?). The consequence is that the teachers that work at many of the schools that have large percentages of black students tend to be terrible teachers, not because someone is trying to actively hurt black students, but because the processes that help get bad teachers out (oversight, parental involvement) simply don't function in those schools, and the good teachers that start in that environment very quickly burn out (or are chased out by corrupt school administration when they speak out) and move on.
But there is a limit to how much they can do that, so they would need to actually assess the real grade levels of their students and give them appropriate material.
I have a feeling that teachers feel that they are only allowed/supposed to provide curriculum for the particular grade level and are afraid that they will be sued or get in trouble if they provide remedial material. And so they just accept that the students will not be able to really learn the material or even understand the hand outs.
There is also probably quite a lot of racial tension involved. In other words, many of the white teachers probably generally resent many of the black student's attitudes, and many of the black students probably generally resent the white teachers. The teacher probably feel that the students need to do extra homework, but know that they do little or none, and also probably feel like they cannot meet with parents. In an environment like that, it may be very difficult to present a student and/or parent and/or principal with the harsh reality that the student is reading 3 years below grade level, and so they just don't address the fundamental problem.
Then the other problem is probably that the vast majority of families are struggling financially and so is the school.
Education needs to be tailored to the individual. There are always going to be several dramatically different levels of skills in each class. Technology can help to tailor learning, although its really not required. The problem is that the grade level business has a very strong tradition.
That is just plain wrong!
And it is a fact more damning--if true--of our education system than the student's original essay was.
(Though I'm guessing that the claim that she was harassed of of the school by teachers is sure to be a controversial and as-yet unproven one.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4450392
appears to have gone dead. As I recall, ColinWright posted it the last time.
AFTER EDIT: A question came up below my comment. How good stuff gets to the front page of HN is by active users of HN who have read the guidelines
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
visiting the new page and upvoting the best submissions that they find on the new page. Note that by the site founder's submission history
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg
and by his writing career,
http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
it would appear that articles about education policy are within the broad topic scope of Hacker News, as long as they otherwise meet the site guidelines and are original articles from reliable sources. The article under discussion here is plainly about education policy; whether or not it comes from a reliable source is a matter on which reasonable minds might differ.
The 'continuing school vs leaving' is going to be re-visited at HN while the cost of education decreases the risks of starting a startup.
"... The previous submission of this story ..."
Good point. I gave up checking via search. I wait for the day url/story title non-duplication exists in the HN code.
I would guess most parents of this school would have trouble with this level of investment in their kids education. Not because they don't care but perhaps because they have to work two jobs, or they are struggling as a single parent, or they were simply never taught that you don't get an education just by showing up to school. That's not because they're black either but because they're poor. (which unfortunately is often related to race)
The sad thing is that this girl is right, but the problem is so much bigger than she can imagine and she's only lashing out at people she knows, which are the teachers.
America is failing as a nation when it comes to education. We set up our education system based on babysitting kids for far too long. All throughout history people started becoming members of society far sooner. Most became an apprentice around 13 or so. We babysit in high school until 18, and it means that the students who would rather be working in a field or on cars are miserable, and those who want to go to higher education don't get the environment they deserve.
I was living in Buffalo, and my neighbor was a young inner-city school teacher. One day we were chatting, and she mentioned that she had been giving talks to soon-to-be teaching graduates, trying to convince them to come to inner-city schools to teach (apparently not many graduates wanted to teach in inner-city schools).
That's pretty cool, I told her. So what's your secret? How does one become a good teacher in the inner-city schools?
Well, she replied, it's quite easy really. You must realize that these people (her words) aren't used to doing homeworks or working hard. So I just let them slide when they don't do their homeworks or their assignments. They have a different culture, and I've adapted to it.
My jaw hit the floor.
If you look at the majority of governments in the world, there's only a moderate attention to things like education, health, culture, etc.. Unless it's actually on the basis of the country's history and focus or by popular demand/revolt.
This isn't limited to third world/authoritarian regimes. Those have cases where there's investment because the economy actually depends on these (i.e.: a country that's a usual vacation destination invest in culture, one that "imports health patients" invest in health, although education can usually be disregarded in any case).
Granted, there seems to be a bias in the child's comments, BUT that doesn't mean they are completely wrong; even if her explanation is.
Today's education fails on a number of fronts, you don't need to look at race (from teachers or pupils) to find the culprit (granted there are cases). I point to the failure of policy makers, the grand education system with it's various components and throw in a share of the blame to the parents and general public as well.
At no point in her essay does she call for black majority schools or say the problem is not enough black teachers. It seems like most of the posts in this discussion are claiming that is her argument but it is not. It is odd that there would be so much discussion about some unrelated topic that wasn't even brought up in her argument.
So what does she say? Two major themes are that she calls for white teachers to be more accountable and to improve their pedagogy, and she calls for students to expect more of their teachers.
http://uncommonschools.org/our-schools
appears to be making a difference for learners who don't grow up with the advantages I grew up with in suburban Minnesota and Wisconsin. I suggest readers of Hacker News take a look at the research originating in that organization, especially the book Teach Like a Champion,
http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470...
for ideas about how to fix the problems mentioned in the article submitted here.
That is depressing.
This girl doesn't need her teacher.