The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, guided by Andrew Sum, continues to turn out the best research on gender and the economy, especially high poverty, minority boys.
The answer: 22 percent end up in jail, according to the study.
And yet, you see it here and elsewhere. Black boys don’t read, in many instances, because elementary school teachers don’t know how to teach them to read. It’s not all due to “The Wire” hood stuff. And when teachers can’t teach them, they end up referring them to special education — couldn’t be our teaching competence, right?
OK, it might help if Arne and Barack moved away from the bb metaphors…I get the point…but bottom line, that’s not really the point.
When boys don’t read, they act out to avoid the classroom embarrassment. And then they get suspended. And then they get expelled. And then they end up in jail … all of which leads to those bogus figures about states being able to predict their prison populations by third grade reading scores.
Allow me to summarize: That kind of of reverse engineering of data may seem perfectly logical, but there’s no ‘there there’. This whole thing about “acting white” reminds me of the video games theory: Boys don’t learn to read because the power of World of Warcraft sucks away their academic interests. Parents, your boys got lost in school because teachers failed to engage them. Then they turned to World of Warcraft.
Your black boys aren’t reading because of the “acting white” conventional wisdom; they’re not reading because your neighborhood educators — and you — never engaged them.
This from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research:
Supporting African American Boys in School
July 2009
Low educational achievement contributes to and perpetuates socioeconomic, health, and other inequalities for African Americans. And for males in particular, educational and employment outcomes have declined, even over the past two decades.
Research into low academic achievement for African American children shows that the culture of children and their teachers affects student engagement and learning, and that parental involvement and social networks are important.
Catalyst Magazine lays out the numbers on suspensions: One in four black boys suspended at least once during the previous school year. The assumption that these young men are merely bringing the street life into school is not entirely accurate. When schools allow these young men to slip behind (and literacy skills are the best indicator here), acting out is preferable to looking dumb.
From the Catalyst (photo courtesy of Catalyst):
Black male conundrum
In Chicago’s public schools, African-American males are suspended and expelled at a higher rate than any other student group. Yet educators are working to raise black male graduation rates, creating a classic case of policy and practice at odds.
by Sarah Karp
June, 2009
Nearly one in four black male students in Chicago Public Schools was suspended at least once last year, a rate that is twice as high as the district average.
In Philadelphia, black boys make up less than a third of the student population but nearly 60% of the student needing “emotional support.” This article from an independent Philly journal lays out the tough numbers. Actually, the entire article merits printing, but first this “but.” Be aware when you reach the part where the writer quotes someone from the Education Law Center, who correctly points out there’s no one single cause but still cites poverty is a key player. Well, yes and no. When you cite poverty, isn’t there an accompanying need to explain why this is happening to boys but not as much to their sisters, who come from the same families, neighborhoods and schools?
The article:
by Sylvia Morse
African American boys make up 59 percent of students enrolled in “emotional support” programs in Philadelphia but less than a third of the general student population. They are six times more likely to be labeled emotionally disturbed than White girls.
White girls are four times more likely than Black boys to be identified as mentally gifted.
Highlighting similar statistics in her incoming convocation speech in August, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said, “The research clearly shows us that for young men of color, particularly African American and Latino … a special education label, especially ‘emotionally disturbed,’ becomes a life sentence, causing many … to drop out of school early and enter the criminal justice system.”
Overrepresentation of students of color in special education is a reality nationwide. Many say racial biases among those who refer and evaluate students for special education are a factor.
“When a child of color is bored and they act out, [school authorities] assume it’s a behavioral problem,” says Cecilia Thompson, chairperson of the Right to Education Task Force of Philadelphia. “I believe [the student] could be mentally gifted, but the mindset is on emotional support.”
The tendency to identify disruptive behavior as a sign of more severe disability may result from cultural gaps between teachers and students. White teachers in urban school districts unfamiliar with the language and survival strategies many students acquire outside of school are more likely to make inappropriate referrals, research suggests.
Studies indicate the risk of students being identified with a disability varies by race, even controlling for the effects of class.
Disproportions are most pronounced in the high-incidence or “judgmental” categories: emotionally disturbed, learning disabled, and mildly mentally retarded, which require less medical or psychological professional oversight.
But poverty also contributes to the likelihood of disability. “It’s a multifaceted thing,” says Len Rieser, co-director of the Education Law Center. “There can’t be a single ‘why.’”
The national Civil Rights Project concluded in a 2002 report that unconscious racial discrimination by school authorities, resource inequities, biased methods of evaluation, pressures of high-stakes testing on teachers, and the dynamic between parents of color and school administrators all contribute to ethnic and gender disparities in special education.
An example illustrates how the inequalities associated with poverty can contribute to faulty decisions by individuals and lead to disproportions. A teacher in a stressed, high-poverty school may have more students who need extra attention but fewer resources outside of special education. Special education is then seen as the only supportive environment, and teachers are more likely to make referrals.
A District official observed that often it is the parents who want an evaluation. “We’re still in the mindset that there’s something special about special education,” says Linda Williams, administrator for the District’s Office of Specialized Services (OSS), “that it’s a place and not a service.”
To address overrepresentation, the District has introduced professional development for school psychologists that will “build their skills, especially around areas of culture,” Williams says.
The District is also promoting inclusion and a coteaching model, which integrates students with and without special needs in one classroom led by both a grade teacher and a special education teacher.
Decatur Elementary in the Northeast is “a model school for inclusion practices,” Williams says. The school’s principal, Charles Connor, believes the number of referrals went down when special education was no longer a separate, restricted environment. Because general education teachers remain responsible for the students they refer, Connor says, special education is no longer a way to unload difficult-to-teach students.
Local advocates believe most parents don’t understand that overrepresentation of children of color in special education is a systemwide problem. If they did, parents might be able to make better decisions for their own children.
“It’s the ‘Why me?’ syndrome,” Thompson says. “[Parents] think it’s just them.”
And they don’t always exercise their rights in the process. “They think the psychological evaluation is the beall end-all,” Thompson says. But she adds that parents’ role can be crucial in combating misguided placements if they have the right information.
Anyone interested the school problems faced by black boys should tap into this website, Success For Black Boys.
And, if you need to take a look at the other end of the pipeline, the paucity of black males graduating from college, see this article about the University of Texas.
I”m a big admirer of the work done by the Consortium on Chicago School Research (my advice: when you see Melissa Roderick’s name on a report, read it), including this report posted at Center for American Progress on barriers to college attainment. Compelling fact: While 83% of Chicago high school seniors aspire to earn a four-year degree, only 8% of black and Latino males actually achieve that within six years. Just step back, take a deep breath, and let that one settle into your bones.
Insidehighered writes about the Swimming Against the Tide book which describes how black women become successful in the sciences. In the Q&A, author Sandra Hanson is asked about the academic outcome differences between black men and black women, an issue that is rarely raised. Answers Hanson:
The question asks first about the different experiences of African American girls and boys in science. There is research that suggests African American students in general have more positive attitudes about science than any other subgroup. My research shows, however, that young African American women are particularly interested in science (more so than their African American male counterparts). Although data show young women of all races doing better than (or on a par with) young men early on in the science pipeline, this trend reverses itself in later stages of the science pipeline among white, but not African American students. African American girls have been shown to have more positive attitudes, take more courses, get better grades, and in general show more involvement in math and science than their male counterparts.
My research tries to provide insights into this trend by using a multi-cultural gender framework that recognizes the unique gender system in African American families. Historically, African American women have had to work. They combined work and family roles. Gender inequality in African American families has been shown to be less than in other families (whether looking at labor force participation, education, or earnings). Some have suggested that (due to a variety of cultural and economic contexts) African American women are doing better than African American men, and families (both historically and today) make more investments in their daughters than in their sons. Indeed African American families, more than white families, emphasize education and occupations as sources of mobility for their daughters. Taken together, these race and gender arrangements have created a unique gender culture in African American communities that often creates gender patterns that are the reverse of those in white communities. The gender culture in the African American community helps explain the advantages that young African American women sometimes have over African American men and white women in the science education system. This is in spite of the fact that my research shows young white women experiencing less inequality and bias in the science education system than their African American counterparts. Additionally, my results show young white women have an advantage on teacher interest, school honors, and school programs
This is running in today’s paper:
You can see the message on brick wall murals in inner cities: Yes we can. You can hear it in the music of Black Eyed Peas’ frontman will.i.am: Yes we can.
You can imagine hearing it pass the lips of thousands of black mothers, perhaps after awakening their sons early to complete homework before they head off to school, just as President-elect Barack Obama’s mother did: Yes you can.
There’s no question Obama was elected by Americans of all races and ethnicities to be president of all America. But many hope that his presidency will have a profound impact on one group most in need, African-American boys.
Obama’s success notwithstanding, the American dream remains a more distant hope for black boys than it does for any other group. Taken as a whole, their eighth-grade reading and math scores are scales below those of other students. In many school districts, virtually the only students getting expelled are black males. They make up 9% of enrollments but 20% of the mental-retardation classifications.
The social price of this is terribly high. One in five black males lacking a high school diploma is incarcerated. Other statistics are similarly discouraging.
Black males might come from the same families, neighborhoods and schools as their sisters, but the girls’ outcomes are very different. For the most part, black females are doing far better than black males, outdistancing them by wide gaps in high school graduation and college enrollment rates. Many colleges report that black women have higher graduation rates than white men.
This gender gap has many causes, starting with the fact that 70% of black children are born into single-parent families. The girls have mothers for role models; the boys lack fathers. Then, ladle on daily doses of inner-city crime, violence, drugs and toxic popular culture, which disproportionately affect boys.
Enough of the bad news.
What matters today is determining how to leverage Obama’s historic achievement into a fresh beginning for black boys. Confidence is important, but it’s not sufficient. As Obama often says, success begins with parents willing to take responsibility, set limits and turn off the TV. But successful education reforms have shown that the right academic atmosphere can help overcome dysfunctional family situations. Some positive steps, culled from the best research about what works in the real world, include:
Focus on literacy
In elementary school, children get one shot at learning to read. Those who fail often are classified as having a learning disability. (Did you really expect schools to blame themselves for failing to teach?) Or the children are passed along unprepared to middle school, where scant time is spent actually learning to read.
Two things need to change: Don’t give up on the boys in elementary school, and keep teaching reading skills in middle school. Many English teachers in middle school know more about teaching literature than they do about teaching reading skills, which means the first step is training the teachers.
Learn from successful schools
Few African-African boys have access to elite private schools such as Washington’s Sidwell Friends, where the Obama girls started classes Monday. But several inner-city schools are showing impressive results. At the Key Academy in Washington, D.C., a charter that is part of the successful KIPP group, black boys arrive in fifth grade reading two grades behind the girls. By seventh grade, they pull even. Their success is related to a persistent focus on literacy skills, even in science and math classes.
At New York’s Frederick Douglass Academy, a regular public school where two-thirds of the students qualify for the free lunch program, students take courses that rival the rigor of anything offered in the best suburban schools, and nearly all go on to college.
Create college mentoring programs
Roughly two-thirds of black males who enter college never earn degrees, an astonishing statistic. Several community colleges and four-year colleges are counteracting this successfully by creating one-on-one mentoring programs and support groups of black males.
Obama has signaled that he intends to be more than a role model. His biggest education issue, ramping up the federal role in offering high-quality preschools, could have a huge impact on black boys, especially if he launches research into making preschools work as well for boys as they do for girls.
The president-elect’s promise to double funding for effective charter schools such as KIPP mirrors reform efforts in Chicago, where his choice to become the federal Education secretary, Arne Duncan, served as schools chief for the past seven years.
Most important, Obama has resisted calls from the teachers’ unions to dismantle President Bush’s No Child Left Behind school-reform law. Whatever the law’s shortcomings, No Child’s relentless emphasis on data forces school districts to come clean about the poor job they have done with black boys.
These are all reforms worthy of support. Obama’s symbolism is undeniably powerful, but it will take more than symbolism to go beyond yes-we-can sloganeering.
Here’s retired WPost columnist William Raspberry writing in today’s Post. Obama’s unique background is invaluable in moving the discussion beyond the grievance-based dialogue of years past and toward the personal responsibility side. Researchers examining why black middle class students in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights lagged behind their white counterparts put their finger partly on factors under the control of parents, such as the amount of time spent watching TV or the exposure to family literacy.
Writes Raspberry:
Black communities are beset by crime and violence but, again, less because of racism than because of lack of discipline in those communities. One key reason for this failure of discipline is the dissolution of black families — not because of discrimination but because black Americans lead the nation in fatherlessness, having allowed marriage to fall to an all-time-low priority.
Obama tried to talk about some of this during his campaign, frequently pointing out that government can do little to improve education unless parents take control of the television, read to their children and check their homework.
Obama, says Raspberry, is in a unique position to shift the dialogue:
How has Obama come to see so clearly the need for black America’s active and confident participation in solving its problems?
First, he is supremely confident in his own ability to succeed at whatever he sets out to do, and his experience may lead him to see the power of self-confidence in general. Second, he grew up without the encumbrance of a personal link to American slavery. It is easy even for the descendants of slavery to forget how powerfully that not-so-distant experience guides our sense of destiny. We tend to see slavery as a palpable, almost genetic, experience; that is one reason so many black Americans initially had trouble accepting Obama, with his Kenyan father and white American mother, as authentic.
But while our handed-down “remembrance” of slavery makes us super-conscious of (and, we imagine, steels us against) white America’s racist possibilities, it does two other things as well. It leads us too easily to a racial explanation of all that goes wrong in our community, and it encumbers us with the burden of doubt as to what this country will let us do — and be.
Obama certainly did not escape American racism; his skin saw to that. But he did escape the encumbrance of “genetic” slavery; the people who raised him saw to that.
It’s worth noting where Raspberry is devoting his his retirement time: president of Baby Steps, a parent training and empowerment program based in Okolona, Miss.
