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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know, black-majority schools with black teachers (vs. white teachers) don't do any better. Even the ones with more funding than the white-majority schools.

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

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Don't miss the point just because a 13 year old did: Our lack of dedication to equal access to quality education is putting a generation at risk of being, essentially, enslaved. She made this about race, but it's about class (and by extension about race, because of America's unfortunate race/class relationship).

Her reasoning is still very specious - there's a very, very big difference between oppression as an unintended consequence of systemic failure, and a deliberate manipulation of the system into oppressing its people.

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.

Grasping at straws about racism in the American Education system? That's grasping at straws? I agree it's not actually, wholly, about race, but it's clearly a massive issue that is willfully ignored by the public at large. You wouldn't BELIEVE what the majority minority (and again, I really do believe that's more of a consequence of old systems than current ones) public schools are like in my hometown of Richmond, VA. They're not even really schools.

Wow. That's some comment. Hard to know where to start to unpack it. You must have been having a lousy day.

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.

> "You're just short of blaming the victim."

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.

There are some controversial studies that show that immigrant blacks can do well -even better than 'native' whites in education. Some of it may have to do with parenting, family structure, social status, etc. http://www.bornblackmag.com/Black_Immigrants_Vs_African_Amer...

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.

Ogbu has been discussed on HN before. Here is one of my responses: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2046616

As far as I know, black-majority schools with black teachers (vs. white teachers) don't do any better. Even the ones with more funding than the white-majority schools.

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.

>As far as I know, black-majority schools with black teachers (vs. white teachers) don't do any better. Even the ones with more funding than the white-majority schools.

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).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di0-xN6xc_w

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opinion/08brooks.html

> An interesting video I came across ("Look In The Mirror") a while ago -->

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...

that never allows anyone but the whites to take the blame

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.

Well, the original article in this thread was quoting the student as blaming the white teachers, specifically, for not teaching well enough because their students were black.

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?"

For which she was chased out of school rather than offered dialogue, so it sounds as though in this case she may have been partly right. And also, the teachers did not shoulder the blame here, they made sure that a 13 year old kid did for daring to criticise and judge them in an essay. And that is appalling.

To be fair she basically called her teachers modern-day slave drivers. She is right that something stinks, but the problem is a lot more complex than that.

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.

The United States, for instance.

I been there, and it definitely doesn't fit the description.

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?

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