Category: News and Views
Seems, according to an article yesterday on www.msn.com, the gap in educational achievement between black males & their white, Asian, and Hispanic counterparts is greater than it was originally thought to be & they really are falling behind. On a side note, like "African American", "Hispanic" is another catch all kind of nonsense term. Spanish speaking populations are composed of many different races & racial mixtures, and some of the nationalities even may dislike each other. For example our Guatemalan neighbor couldn't even stand the mention of the Mexican soccer team, and Puerto Ricans & Cubans tended to dislike each other when I lived in Florida.
Anyway, I wonder what the explanation(s) is for this. All of the government intervention, healthy & head start, subsidized breakfast & lunch, ebonics as an official language in California, No Child Left Behind...really the cons get as silly as the libs on government intervention sometimes...and for some reason young black males are doing worse. I don't think the problem is as much with foreign born blacks, as MA has somewhat high SAT scores among its black students, and we have our share of the Carribean & African born & raised. People from places like Kenya & Guinea I have heard run 10 miles to the nearest school, share supplies with their schoolmates, even study in the middle of the night at the airport since that's the only place with any electricity.
I wonder what's going on with the native born blacks to give them such dismal prospects...single female headed households, to which boys tend to adapt worse than girls? Ghetto culture? Teasing by peers when they study & want to succeed, even such name calling as "Oreo Cookie" and "Eskimo Pie", or "black on the outside white on the in" that the kids cave into & abandon their studies? Absentee parenting? Other?
I don't know what the causes of this are but it seems to start early. Here's an example. Last week, my son was rewarded for doing his homework. Ok, that's great, but he was just doing what was expected of him. Turns out that only 9 out of 21 kids in his first grade class did their homework on that particular day. His class is mostly made up of black and hyspanic students with my son and two or three other white kids in the mix. Other problems I've seen at this school include teachers who speak ebonics, and discipline problems that would have been solved by the principal's paddle in my day.
I don't know what the sollution is but obviously throwing money at the situation hasn't worked. I really thinnk allot of it has to do with parental involvement or a lack there of. Also, if a poverty culture, or wellfare lifestyle is all one has ever known for generations, what would motivate a child to strive for more.
It's sad really.
Maybe it's "equality" in education that's part of the problem. I believe it's Tennessee that abolished the honor roll that rewards those who went the extra mile in learning because it hurt the "self esteem" of those who didn't quite make it. Sure it hurt a little when I didn't make it, but I struggled more with some subjects than others, and why should those who have extra talent or drive be penalized or labeled as "equals" with those who don't? There's a lot of focus on "underperforming schools", but can teachers or any personnel in a school make truant students attend class? Or conquer problems in the home? I had a neighbor who refused to allow his son to speak any English at home (from Puerto Rico), and that interfered with "Juan"'s reading comprehension at school, not even being helped in English with his homework. I don't know what the solution is either, but maybe reinstalling the old honor roll to reward those who learn would motivate students to perform better.
Hmm. Guess it will be up to the subject of this discusson, black males, to weigh in on it / give the straight dope as to what's really going on over there.
As to boys without fathers, I think that's probably a problem. Even a zoo with some problematic young male elephants in it, once they put in a couple of old bulls, saw less destructive behavior.
But that has no basis in pigment or lack thereof: I imagine girls with no mothers / adult female influences might have some similar problems.
I couldn't agree more with reestablishing the honor role system. Give kids something to strive for. This "everybody is a winner" culture is a complete load of crap. I read a book called the Me Generation a while back and that was one of the premises, equalizing to protect self esteme has caused more problems than it has helped.
I would agree on that front: award those who have striven.
However, again, this has nothing to do with pigment or lack thereof. The fact some sports groups, in white schools, refuse to have a scoreboard or force the winning team to not acquire points, is ridiculous.
Competition isn't the be-all-end-all: there *is no* be-all-end-all. However it's necessary, and most people deprived of the fruits of their labor justifiably feel robbed. The way both extremes are mismanaging this situation makes me want to, as my father used to say, knock a couple of heads together. Neither the gellatinous soft-footed new 'me' or whatever you call it types, nor the totally market-obsequious types, ever really stand tall or square up to a challenge. They're both so busy blaming target groups and otherwise just fooling around.
Backlash against the gellatinous ones is about as useful as the backfiring of an old pickup truck: a genuine waste of fuel and resources.
"I imagine girls with no mothers/adult female influences might have some similar problems." I have a mother, but the relationship is strained to say the least. Girls lacking mothers & adult female influences are a lot less common than boys lacking any adult males in their lives, but here's the skinny from an insider: Best case scenario is squidward here with all guy friends & sitting at the guys' table at lunch, not really able to relate to other women.
Worst case scenario is a couple of young women I know, with mothers who did the "role reversal" thing while husbands stayed at home, or went to work two or three jobs while maybe dad had one, and these girls didn't get one on one talking from their moms they should have. Guess what? Both young women became pregnant young & piss poor. One was pissed because in my former home town, Tampa, evidently it is harder to get food stamps than it is up here. Missy got preggers by a boyfriend with only a part time job as income & his small business just wasn't making it, then got pissed at the state of Florida for not bailing her out, so she came back here. Now, even though she and boyfriend fight to the point it negatively affects the child, she is going to pop out another one, saying she is "skinny and liked the attention the first time around." Oh boy folks what great reasons to have a baby! Maybe had she had a mom who sat her down face to face & banged some heads and told her "This is the skinny on parenting and the only good reason to have a child" rather than one who worked two jobs with one job dad and parented by cell phone her outcome would have been different.
I can only speak from my personal experiences, but the black people at my school weren't interested in learning. They were more interested in disrupting lessons. There are of course, white people like that too, but there is a stronger middle class so it doesn't look so bad statistically.
That's the real problem, statistics.
Statistics mislead, and can be used to cover up certain problems. Using this topic as an example, we read that black boys are doing worse than white boys, but the truth is, that there will be some white boys who are doing just as badly, and misbehaving. Because we're analysing using statistics instead of overt observations, we're not detecting this problem, nor are we noticing the intelligent black men. They're too few in number to have an impact on the stats.
Senior, what was it about the black people in your school that made them uninterested in learning? Now I've never been in the UK, but did post on a British based discussion board that has since shut down. "Merc" did post several articles about unwed mothers & feral youths from places like Jamaica. Was the lack of a male influence possibly why there was no orientation towards learning, as Leo put it, "put some old bulls in the pen" and take care of the discipline problem?