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October 20, 2009
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Achievement gap at home
English teacher Patrick Welsh, writing in the Washington Post:
"Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study."
Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.
[...]
My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn't because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn't wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren't there for them -- at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.
In an example of how bad the fixation on race here has become, last year Morton Sherman, the new superintendent, ordered principals throughout the city to post huge charts in their hallways so everyone -- including 10-year-old kids -- could see differences in test scores between white, black and Hispanic students. One mother told me that a black fifth-grader at Cora Kelly Magnet School said that "whoever sees that sign will think I am stupid." A fourth-grade African American girl there looked at the sign and said to a friend: "That's not me." When black and white parents protested that impressionable young children don't need such information, administrators accused them of not facing up to the problem. Only when the local NAACP complained did Sherman have the charts removed.
Achievement gaps don't break down neatly along racial lines. Take Yasir Hussein, a student of mine last year whose parents emigrated from Sudan in the early 1990s, and who entered the engineering program at Virginia Tech this fall. "My parents were big on our family living the American dream," he said. "One quarter when I got a 3.5 grade-point average, the guys I hung around with were congratulating me, but my parents had the opposite reaction. They took my PlayStation and TV out of my bedroom and told me I could do better."
Yasir said it wasn't just fear that made him study: "Knowing how hard my parents worked simply to give me the opportunity to get an education in America, it was hard for me not to care about getting good grades."
But Yasir's experience isn't what community activists and school administrators at T.C. Williams or around the country focus on. They cast the difference between kids who are succeeding in school and those who are not in terms of race and seem obsessed with what they call "the gap" between the test scores of white and black students.
[...]
But focusing on a "racial achievement gap" is too simple; it's a gap in familial support and involvement, too. Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students. At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom.
All true--and there is much more if you click over and read the whole article. More: if you take his argument seriously, which you should, you also arrive at strong arguments against affirmative action and the diversity industry, both of which have, in their current configurations, broad, toxic racist streaks running right down their middles. Like so much real and meaningful change, you can't engineer it from above; even more to the point, you are not likely to increase someone's sense of their own worth, not to mention their own humanity, by reducing them to a demographic data point and herding them around accordingly. What's happening at home matters. And it matters too, that your teacher and your principal see you as a person--not as a symbol of cultural damage.
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Comments:
On the other end of the economic spectrum, I saw this growing up in the wealthy bedroom community my family lived in. My parents were academics (therefore I was an outcast and a weird kid at school) who pushed me to achieve; lots of the other kids had parents who were too busy climbing the corporate ladder or were too involved with their own lives. And they were the students who were happy to pull Cs and Ds, while going out drinking every weekend.
Not sure what those people are doing today...I wound up as a college professor making a decent living and having a (mostly) enjoyable career, so I figure I probably am getting back for all the times I was harassed or left out because I was the "weird kid who cared about grades."
I like this article, but there's a few big problems with it. First off, it makes no sense to say, "It's not about race, dummy, it's about family." "Race" is a term to describe the effects of various historical and cultural forces on a group; family is one of the big places those forces are felt and felt deeply. A group cannot withstand 300 years of concerted effort to destroy their families without having their families destroyed.
The question is: what can *schools* do now? The Coleman Report in the 60s already determined that the major factors affecting education are outside the control of schools. Working at a rigorous private high school, it's clear that putting a smart kid from a troubled background in a supportive and competitive environment usually motivates that kid to excel. Having gone to a public school with a violence problem it's clear that putting troubled kids around a ton of other troubled kids leads to more trouble.
Which is to say I think we need more *types* of public school (vouchers for private schools only help those who can make up the difference between their $3000 property taxes and the $12,000 tuition to a private school). Students should be given the option to go to year-round boarding schools far away from their homes.
I agree about the boarding schools. I wish it were feasible and, having taught for a year in a private boarding school that was effectively offering low income kids from troubled backgrounds an all-expenses way out and on to broader perspective, hope, and college, I can say it is wonderful when it works. But the costs are mind-boggling. This school had about 90 kids enrolled. About 60% received some financial aid--and because there was no endowment to speak of, that aid came out of the tuition of paying kids. Then there was overhead--building maintenance, food, teacher salaries, also paid for out of tuition. The school was always just on the edge of going under. And while the place was wonderful and noble in one regard, in another it was just inexcusable. One area where they cut costs was teacher quality. Which meant they hired a lot of their alums, fresh out of college, for cheap, and stuck them in classrooms to do whatever. Former English majors at third rate colleges coming into teach Algebra Two -- and doing it so badly that even the kids could see their teacher could not do the math he was supposed to teach them. Pay sucked as well. I made $26K my year there -- and worked 7 days a week, including nights. You practically had to be a missionary--or so incompetent you could not get a job anywhere else--to make it work. Irony of ironies, toward the end of winter I was informed that it was too expensive to keep me on for the next year. Never mind that the kids were finally actually getting some English instruction, and loved it. More important to hire a warm 22 year old body for $20K and let fate take its course.
One example is not a rule. But it is a window.
"Achievement gaps don't break down neatly along racial lines." Fair enough, but I don't think that we can then conclude, as this excerpt seems to imply (rather insidiously), that achievement gaps break down neatly according to whether there is a father living in the household.
Family is absolutely essential, but families come in many forms: extended families, nuclear families, single-parent families. I'm sure we can all think of extremely successful individuals who grew up in families without fathers—Obama for one.
This is not to say that it isn't better to have a family in the household. I'm just pointing out that anecdotal evidence—whether Obama or Yasir Hussein—is of limited use.
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