I'm seeing the other side of this, recently (disadvantaged white people). It's astonishing the loser mentalities and habits that many disadvantaged children learn from their early caregivers and peer group. As middle to upper middle class people, we often have no idea how many little bits of knowledge we pick up to work the system (legally), from those around us.
No. You have parents that are not able to attend to pre-school education, whether it's a time or money issue, or even an education issue themselves. And then you have children, let down by parents who were let down by society, who are ashamed of how far behind they are.
The idea that you can further shame people into "shaping up" is farcical. Please stop being part of the problem.
> But this also was a major source of resentment and ostracization that I'm still dealing with to this day.
Isn't it possible that resentment and ostracization could lead someone to not want to try as hard to learn?
Isn't the standard expectation that children enter first-grade completely illiterate? I remember learning how to read and write letters one per lesson in first grade.
I'd guess that maybe 5% are taught to read by parents?
A theory my parents had was that the limiting factor in teaching a child to read is not the mental capacity, but their eyesight - supposedly it's normal to start out relatively farsighted and unable to focus on small print close up. So they started me and my sister on words printed in very large letters and gradually reduced them.
(I was taught by my parents before even that, and when I started school they didn't believe my parents' claim - had to prove it by reading a new book aloud to them)
Having friends & colleagues from both American Black and African and Black Caribbean backgrounds has given me a tiny glimpse into some of the difference in background and treatment. A Caribbean friend who came here for her PhD in mathematics mentioned to me that she was shocked at how she was treated here in the US -- in her home country, she was universally respected as an educator and a professional, while in the US she was... respected in the classroom, but not on the street. A different friend whose family has been in the US longer than mine, on the other hand, talked about being discouraged from a career in the National Park Service: his grandfather in particular had stories of the violence inflicted on black people in the woods, and felt it would be a very unsafe career. There's a really complex interaction of history, current economics, and personal choice, mediated by our schools. Just looking at the numbers, the US education system is not doing well by black students in particular and many children overall. Rural white kids are also not being served well. No one is getting good math education. And as long as we continue to divide against each other in a fight for artificially limited resources, we won't do better as a nation.
I think we absolutely need to spend money to address disparities in the experience of African American kids in this country. I think the wrong way to do that is to funnel more money into disproportionately white teachers and school administrators. Direct cash payments to inner city families I think would go a lot further.
We should do both, while sourcing more black teachers and administrators for schools from within those communities. The reality is that the history of impoverishment has set of cycles of negligence and trauma in these communities that money alone can't fix, though it can help change the direction.
Treatment from within the community is needed. Practically, the school is where that happens for the children. It would be great if the families would be able to afford to pay for their own treatment like more well off people do, but realistically, the direct payments would primarily be used pay for basics, like food and the roof over their heads.
Something as simple as bundling up school funds to the state level and redistributing similar per-pupil funds back to districts might help to close the gap - with no change in total expenditure.
Local funding is in fact uneven. But state and federal funding is primarily directed to eliminating those disparities: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/alfresco...
> The paper then examines changes in finances over time—both within and across states— and evaluates how spending levels have changed for school districts that serve students of different races. Spending differences have largely disappeared. Spending levels across districts have converged; most remaining differences in spending are between rather than within states.
Obviously Kansas still spends less than California, but everything is much cheaper in Kansas too.
In addition to what I said earlier, I'll add that though $30,000 sounds like a big scary number, it's not so much when realizing that private schools with similar student support programs in DC go for $40,000-$60,000 a year.
As for DC public school performance, aside from the challenges that attending students often face, it should be known that DC has unfortunately served as a testing ground for a number of unorthodox education philosophies, to the detriment of the students. For at least the last two decades, during which I've been aware of the circumstances, we've had several high-profile school system admins attempt to radically reshape how DC schools "work", leaving a constantly shifting landscape in their wake. Multiple school closures, mass teacher firings and mutinies, charter school scandals, and more, while the basics (building maintenance and suitability, teacher professional training and support, resource access, etc.) are neglected.
If there's any truth to your assertions, it really doesn't have anything to do with the people who just want to provide students with traditional, stable learning environments and the support necessary to take full advantage of them.
Trust networks are extremely valuable, and they underpin a lot of the wealth, or lack thereof, in communities.
Poorer African Americans often have limited community and cultural support systems and the implied access to trust networks.
They instead have to contend with the massive and continuous structural damage inflicted upon their communities through the history of the country, including Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, social isolation, and the war on drugs.
It's amazing when you stack up the numbers from redlining, the Freedman's bank failure, these tax shenanigans, and the impact of differential sentencing for minor drug offenses propagating through to inability to access student loans and housing assistance.... (remember, if you rape someone, you can get government student loans, but if you had a baggie of marijuana, you cannot). So much money. And immigrant families, because they're coming here now, have not faced the same systematic impacts.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying immigrant families are in a better financial situation than the discriminated-against blacks, because they weren't discriminated against in the same way? Many immigrant families bring very little with them and have to start from scratch.
However, what they usually bring is intact community and family support structures. Trust is one of the most valuable and scarce resources there is. It can even make up for a lack of money, because valuable services are often provided reciprocally to members of the community at low or no cost, and people tolerate sharing resources more easily with people they trust.
But if there's neither trust nor money, it's a much harder struggle.
Which is pretty damning of the way America treats its own people.
Edit: I want to add that this is not simply my own speculation; this is the explanation that I've heard in part from several friends and acquaintances. They're often horrified by the leniency of standards for even high performing American students, and they will often state that they are not "black" in the way that native African Americans are, and are therefore not subject to the same biases and limitations.
A "goof off" from my community would be struggling to get Bs while a goof from the non-immigrant groups would be struggling to pass at all. And being a "straight-A student" was a baseline expectation rather than a marker of being a rare and special talent. The bar for how many sacrifices parents are willing to make to set their kids up for success is higher too. I got a B- in Math ONCE and my parents immediately hired me a tutor and started forcing me to do remedial exam drills, which is a reaction I don't think I would have seen in the average or median American household among my peer group.
I don't think it's any special level of intelligence among the immigrant community, but I think there is sort of an "Overton window" of cultural expectations for what are normal ways to spend your time, what's an appropriate spread for grades to be at, or what things you should be prioritizing in life. I think immigrant communities maintain an Overton window that prioritizes scholastics over the mainstream culture.
This is probably in large part due to selection bias since the immigration process chooses the cream of the crop, but the durability of this tendency across generations is probably set up by the higher standards I talked about.
[1] Could have come from: Can American Capitalism Survive?, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, maybe Enlightenment Now.
[2] It could very well be luck: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068
Immigrating and deciding to live in another country takes a lot determination.
If you take ambitious and motivated black parents in America I am quite sure their children far outcompete the averages.
I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
Beyond that the US education system, and the EPA works this way too, is that as we find the numbers don't add up to what we want, we lower the standards until we're at a point we think we can achieve some goal.
If they simply made standards that were wwaaaay higher, they would be forced to realize everything is underfunded.
This a false dichotomy. For one, teachers in SV can make 100k. Second the skills required to be an effective teacher are not the same as a good math major. They just aren't. We've all had the brilliant professor who can't teach. But we should pay teachers because good teachers are professionals and they should be rewarded appropriately.
The problem with education is that we treat each kid the same. But actually every kid is different and has unique needs and thus requires a personalized learning program. When they are young these are social and behavioral. As they get older they can be subject specific. An individualized program could be aligned with a cohort in a class setting but you really need individual tutoring to address the child's specific needs and deficits. A good teacher is able to recognize these needs and give them the education they need.
I don't think the two have much to do with each other. being a good k-12 teacher is much more about the teaching skills than the subject mastery. anyone who can complete a stem major should be able to understand all the concepts they would have to present in a high school math class.
I don't know if "competition" is a panacea, but there is definitely something wrong with how a lot of our institutions function.
Education aside, this is an odd comparison. She can have access to a big chunk of all the songs ever recorded, on-demand and for FREE (ad-supported Spotify). Comparing this unfavorably to "a few cassette tapes" is beyond absurd. Similarly, the used car she buys now is leagues better than the one she'd buy back then; not just for her, but environmentally and in terms of safety.
The cost of education is a real shift. But if these are the best examples you can think of to extend that to describing the average family as having "declining standards", you're proving the exact opposite point.
Which she could afford to pay for (albeit at a much lower price than the cassettes would have commanded, appropriate for the advances in distribution efficiency) in a parallel today.
>Similarly, the used car she buys now is leagues better than the one she'd buy back then; not just for her, but environmentally and in terms of safety.
But it's not anywhere near what a new car offers in terms of fuel efficiency and especially safety. So there is a relative QoL loss there.
>The cost of education is a real shift. But if these are the best examples you can think of to extend that to describing the average family as having "declining standards", you're proving the exact opposite point.
They're not, they're just the first that came to mind that fit in a neat illustration.
The overall point is that we're no longer capable of paying outright for things we used to be able to. We have to rely on workarounds (ad support, used goods, debt, theft) to maintain a semblance of the same QoL. Our standards haven't declined perceptionally because we have those tools, but their use is anywhere from unsustainable to morally-objectionable. And if you take them away, you have a far poorer American than one or two generations ago.
Plenty of people home school their children, and reportedly those children have great academic ability. I'm willing to wager the vast majority of those home schooling their kids aren't graduates of a teaching program.
Thanks to common core, I successfully taught a younger family member how to do long division, since common core doesn't teach long division for whatever reason, at least not at the age that we used to learn it. It was simple, intuitive, and I have no math teaching background. It took about 120 seconds to demonstrate the technique for the kid to get it and do it on their own.
It's not a question of funding, it's a question of policy. People want their cake and eat it too. Kids failing in basic mathematics all over the country? Maybe we should overhaul the education system, get rid of useless subjects like science, history, art, 'every kid learns a second language now,' and focus on literacy and mathematics.
However, everyone I know from there thinks that American level of school education is lower, especially in STEM. So they send their children here in NorCal to extra math classes.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
So that isn't the problem, at least relative to the rest of the world.
The worst schools in the USA seem to spend the most. Maybe the money is anti-educational, being used to purchase distractions. DC is spending well over $30,000 per student. At that rate, DC could easily pay 300k for a teacher. It would only require the funds from 1/3 of the class.
When combined with the prevalence of social intervention in the lives of poor families - up to and including removal of the children - you see that there is a profound and toxic distrust of these parents and of their ability to take care of their own children. We've allowed a model to grow where, instead of ensuring people make enough to take care of their families, we shift the burden onto the state. This is inefficient in education for a number of reasons, least of which the central conceit as described above, which undermines the effort at its core.
The specific example I gave, DC, simply destroys the argument that local funding is the problem. DC is very well-funded from national sources, and it has horrific schools.
Perhaps the whole idea that there's a "system" that's responsible for everyone's success is the problem?
You're missing a huge cause before jumping to this conclusion. African immigrants don't just differ from African-Americans in that they weren't born here; they're also a subpopulation that's gone through the dramatic filter of the US's legal immigration policy. If you have a filter that is explicitly trying to select for the educated and economically productive, it's practically a tautology to say that the outcome of that filter will consist of a more educated and productive population than your control group.
I can't imagine the same dynamic wouldn't hold for recent immigrants from most regions vs their many-generations-American counterparts.
All of this seems to suggest that there is something about the American education system - and perhaps our overal culture - that is failing our children, and our black children in particular.
This also makes me wonder if there's data about the mobility of native vs immigrant blacks. If it's similar, it would align with other data that show that degree attainment only serves to partially overcome the barriers to upward mobility placed in the way of black workers.
I'm of the opinion that many of the impediments that punish or withhold assistance from minorities often bleed over into mainstream American life. The specific drum I'll keep beating is that if, perhaps, the infrastructure to battle the crack/cocaine epidemic as a public health issue had been allowed to be built to a robust state, the opioid epidemic would not have become so dire. The apathy towards these issues, even as they encroach upon "mainstream" middle class life, must be part of the mechanics of the calcification of class in America.