They originate in inequities in homes, in socioeconomic status, etc. Nothing new here; schools exacerbate those disparities because they consistently give less to the students who need more and more to the students who have more.
Kids will tell you that when they encounter a good teacher who can inspire them, they become motivated. I have found this to be absolutely true during my thirty-four years of public school teaching experience.
Black students feel less connected to school and believe they have more negative relationships with their peers and their white counterparts.
There’s a perception that if you do the same thing, you’ll get a worse punishment if you’re black.
I have personally observed the following: Black students achieve more academically with both white teachers and black teachers, depending on the teacher’s attitude, personality, and behavior. Black students exhibit oppositional defiant disorder with coercive black and white teachers, white students with white and black teachers.
Some teachers’ expectations for black students are lower than they are for white students, while lower-performing schools tend to be staffed by teachers who have less experience, fewer advanced degrees, and higher absenteeism. Districts may need to conduct homegrown research on student attitudes, teacher attitude / satisfaction, class size, tracking, etc., before we understand how to change student learning.
It’s true that some black students choose to be D students (usually a lack of effort, not ability, motivation, and negative attitude) and project/exhibit their anger toward high-achieving black students and say, “Are you trying to be white, ‘N’?” However, more commonly, low-achieving, antiacademic black students simply segregate themselves from their high-achieving peers, both black and white.
Refer to AfricanAmericanImages.com for further information.
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Answers Aren’t So Good
Questions, questions, questions.
Politician: If schools of education are so good, why are public and charter schools so bad?
Educator: If medical schools are so good, why is there obesity, disease, cancer, diabetes?
If law schools are so good, why is there crime and injustice?
If schools of economics are so good, why is there poverty, greed, and an unstable stock market?
If history departments are so good, why is there war? And why do we learn from history that we never learn anything from history? Or is history just one damn thing after another?
If religious and theology departments are so good, why is there hate and evil?
If political science departments are so good, why are there venal, narcissistic, megalomaniac politicians? Why do they call politics a science?
If schools of dentistry are so good, why is there periodontal disease?
If science departments are so good, why is there global warming and pollution?
Politician: I guess Gertrude Stein was right when she said, “There ain’t no answer, there ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.”
Educator: Science seems to have a possible answer. In science, it’s dangerous to lie. If discovered, the liar is cast out of the group as a faker, fraud, quack, and charlatan. In religion, politics, and psychiatry, it’s dangerous to tell the truth. If discovered, the truth teller is cast out of the group as a heretic and traitor. The problems we face will not be solved by the minds that created them. You can get all As and still flunk life. As Mark Twain said, “I never let schooling interfere with my education.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Kids Who Choose Not to Learn May Have Right Idea
To the editor:
What terms or phrases come to mind when we think and ponder education reform / restructuring? In my 30 years of classroom teaching experience, here are some possibilities: stonewalling, filibustering, phony facades, incantations, pompous ostentations, consternations, debacles, nihilism, arcane jargon, harangues, diatribes, demagoguery, gibberish and conjurations are just a few that come to mind which translates to “When all is said and done –– more was said than done.”
We still have the assembly-line factory model organizational structure (hurry-rush 50 minute periods; five minute break; seven times a day) until we feel like one of B.F. Skinner’s pigeons. No wonder a great majority of students don’t equate school with learning; they equate it with stress or purgatory. Some schools have changed to block-scheduling, which seems to have helped this psychological dilemma. A colleague of mine said one of his education professors (you know, the ivory tower docent academic theorists) said that education will always be a century behind the times: “if we continue to do the same things in the same way and expect different results, then we are indeed insane.”
David T. Kearns, chairman and CEO of Xerox Corporation, said, “Public education in this country is in crisis. America’s public schools graduate 700,000 functionally illiterate students every year and 700,000 more drop out; four out of five adults in a recent survey couldn’t summarize the main point of a newspaper article, or read a bus schedule, or figure their change from a restaurant bill.” In his book I Won’t Learn from You, Kohl goes on to say, “Such not-learning is often and disastrously mistaken for failure to learn or the inability to learn.”
“Learning how to not-learn is an intellectual and social challenge. Sometimes you have to work very hard at it. It consists of an active, often ingenious, willful rejection of even the most compassionate and well-designed teaching. It subverts attempts at remediation as much as it rejects learning in the first place. It was through insight into my own not-learning that I began to understand the inner world of students who chose to not-learn what I wanted to teach. Through the years, I’ve come to side with them in their refusal to be molded by a hostile society and have come to look upon not-learning as positive and healthy in many situations. I came to understand that children in school act in ways that are shaped by the institution; therefore, it is essential never to judge a child by his or her school behavior.”
One final piece of information as reported in The American Teacher confirms the relative disadvantage of US
