Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Systemic Racism In Public Education

Public education certainly has a "culture" associated with it, considering that so many of the people who work in the field have college degrees.  I honestly don't think there's systemic racism in schools, I honestly don't think all those union teachers (or the non-union ones, but I had to throw in a union jab there) are racists.  I think there are groups of people whose culture doesn't mesh well with that of public education, though, and it's easier to point their fingers at teachers than to look at themselves:
But can this disparity really be blamed on lack of quality education for blacks? Are blacks really not going to college because of socioeconomic reasons or hidden racism that denies them opportunities given to “privileged” white students?

Despite what Brown and civil rights leaders say, not all research supports this conclusion. One preeminent study by John Ogbu, “Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement,” concluded that the education gap between whites and blacks has more to do with community forces than economic status or racism.

These community forces, which include the ways minorities interpret and respond to school, as well as beliefs and behaviors within the minoirty community regarding education, work against blacks succeeding in the educational system. Ogbu found that this is something that does not affect other minorities in the same way or to the same degree as blacks, if at all.

While all minorities express some level of mistrust in white Americans, blacks are more concerned about how they’re treated by the teachers than they are with the teachers’ ability to provide them with an education that will make them productive citizens. One is purely subjective, the other is objective...

This means blacks don’t feel like they’re part of the educational environment, which is indeed largely defined by society’s dominant culture (a reality in most developed countries). They feel like they’re ostracized or neglected, not because they aren’t accepted by the education system, but because they perceive it is oppositional to their interests. This, in turn, makes them oppositional to the education system.

This implies that if there’s a bias, it’s on the part of blacks toward the white education system, not whites toward blacks. If the white education were truly riddled with subtle racism, then no other minority would be able to succeed.

But blacks have more trouble because they perceive that the system is against them. Instead of simply using the system as a tool to prepare for higher education and life, as other minorities do, they’re looking for an environment that reflects their image and treats them as they expect to be treated. When those subjective expectations don’t happen, they cry racism.
I have read that immigrant blacks have far higher educational results than American-born blacks. If that's true, it supports the commentary snipped above.
This is why young black students are often ambivalent toward blacks who are “successful in white institutions or white establishments in society” or students who make good grades. Ogbu’s data raised the question, not of how white education can “stop being racist,” but “how the black community and schools can work to minimize this type of ambivalence and dismantle the perception of certain attitudes and behaviors as racialized.” In other words, can blacks stop seeing everything through the lenses of race?

Given this cultural bias within the black community, it is no wonder that Ogbu found that black parents left achievement up to schools and did not actively invest their time and resources into making it happen for their children.
I've never heard a teacher criticize a high-achieving black student as "acting white".  There have been native born black Americans who have pointed this out, but the most prominent one I can think of, Bill Cosby, is too easily dismissed nowadays due to issues entirely unrelated to such views.

Update, 1/17/18:  Can you really cry "racism" in that most progressive of progressive cities, San Francisco?
Black students in San Francisco would be better off almost anywhere else in California.

Many attend segregated schools and the majority of black, Latino and Pacific Islander students did not reach grade-level standards on the state's recent tests in math or English tests.

A local NAACP leader called for declaring a "state of emergency" for black student achievement, a problem the city's school board acknowledged. "The problem cannot be reduced to one sickness or one cure," said Rev. Amos C. Brown, San Francisco's NAACP branch president. "Black students have been underachievers. They're living in toxic situations. It's amazing they've done as well as they have done, but it's criminal that sophisticated children in progressive San Francisco are performing at these levels."

But is the solution to fix what's broken, or to start schools anew? Answering that question has unveiled a heated political debate in Northern California.
What are these "toxic situations" that Brown mentioned?  Are they at all related to what Ogbu described above?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

It has been years since I read Ogbu’s work, but I think that he found that blacks spent much less time on academics than whites. (who spend much less time than Asians) - which is a significant factor in achievement. I have read the same elsewhere. That did not, IIRC, include attendance, which is very significant. It was recently reported that a majority of Ballou HS (DC) “graduates” had missed 6 weeks of school, half had missed 3 months and 20% had missed at least 90 days (half the year). You cannot teach kids who are not in school.

You also cannot teach those who reject academics and see academic success as a betrayal of their race. We knew a kid, the son of parents who had earned their house in a strong suburban district the old-fashioned way of good education, hard work and traditional values, who was immediately targeted by his racemates, newly transplanted from inner-city DC via the local socioeconomic-integration program, as an Oreo and a sellout. His work ethic and behavior took such a dive that his parents had to put him in a private school to keep him away from poisonous attitides and behaviors. Thank Heaven, he quickly returned to the happy and successful kid he had been.

Also, I recently read that a group of black students at one of the Ivies made a complaint to the admin that too many blacks ( I think almost half) on campus were immigrants or children of recent immigrants, and not descendents of American slaves, which shoots a rather large hole into the racist school argument. I have not seen a SAT breakdown of recent immigrant blacks vs indigenous blacks, but I do know that upper-middle-class blacks have known, at least since the 80s, that they did not have to have the same coursework rigor, GPA or SATs as whites, let alone Asians, to be admitted to elite colleges. My kids’ classmates readily admitted it.

Even the urban kids who are motivated are negatively affected by the presence of large numbers of classmates who are not, since schools are unwilling to group by academic level, even when the kids are of the same ethnic group.

Ellen K said...

I have heard students accuse minority students who study, participate, do well in school of "acting white." Sometimes they do it in those terms and in other euphemisms. My school changed their entire schedule in order to provide tutoring to African American male students-a group that was categorically doing lower than almost any other group. The school began by offering a late bus, snacks, threats, but parents would give these students excuses to skip. These are not children of poor families. These are kids who live in big houses, whose parents have degrees and who have all the amenities of an upscale life. But this same group refuses to go to tutorials, disrupts classes, start fights.....and it's not ALL the kids, but a core group of students who everyone, including administrators, fears. I can make every exception, play games, modify instruction, but in the end unless the students WANTS to succeed, they won't. Frankly what are the downsides? There's safety nets everywhere and they can blame everyone else.

lgm said...

As the quote says, its criminal that sophisticated children in progressive SF are performing at these levels.

Schools need to learn from the DoD results. Group by instructional need. Everyone works. Classroom teacher responsible for re-teach, not parents.
Diversity will happen...the ages will be a bit different just as they are now in the included classroom, but all will progress instead of the majority idling.

lgm said...

To answer your question, the toxic situation is the location of the housing the remaining black students live in...its near a naval shipyard that was declared a SuperFund site due to the amount of toxic chemicals used when it was an active shipyard. https://publicpolicy.stanford.edu/news/why-san-francisco-state%E2%80%99s-worst-county-black-student-achievement <-- click on links in this article. Basically he's speculating that the asthma and toxic chemicals have taken a toll on the health of the workers and their descendants and that is a cause of the difficulty in learning in the classroom.

He is right...the kids can't focus if they have genetic issues that are preventing them from focusing, or recalling what they've learned. Be cool if some of the very rich SFians fund some genetic sequencing and basic health lab work, particularly with the folic acid issues introduced by the overabundance in the free meals. Those are estimated to affect 30% of the population, with those having double mutations feeling memory impairment well before Alzheimer's age. Its like a Star Trek episode.

Darren said...

That's one possibility, but it doesn't explain the lack of achievement across the entire city/county of San Francisco.

lgm said...

From the LA Times, 1/2/2018
Matthews wants to attack the achievement gap by improving the quality of his workforce, making sure teachers can serve different types of learners within the same classroom and ensuring students and teachers see achievement as something that can grow, rather than a fixed quantity. He is keeping a close eye on schools that appear successful but fail specific groups of students. “If those students are succeeding, why aren’t African American students succeeding there?” he said. “We’re doing all we can to keep high-quality teachers in our system” and providing “culturally relevant” training.

I am not in SF, but when an admin says that here, it means the classroom teacher can't serve all learners due to the wide spread in preparation. S/he simply can't prepare a whole class lesson that will have something for every child. The 'if x, not y group is succeeding in a classroom' is explained as lack of cultural relevance to group y. That's a tough sell when group x is coming from a war zone or poverty and the parents don't speak english and group y has the language and the community resources...that's why he's reaching for the health explanation as a difference between the groups..but its a tough sell, as the bigwigs decided that special needs had too many black students and the cause was racism & tracking, not health...and he has no genetic evidence.


lgm said...

Have you seen the Air Force Academy's work on peer influence on academic success: https://www.stripes.com/news/us/what-an-air-force-academy-experiment-teaches-us-about-how-to-help-all-students-shine-1.489475 is the popular article.

Darren said...

I haven't, I'll take a read.