Blog Surfing

So, I was blog surfing today and I noticed that most blogs don't have any comments. So the natural question I had (yes I ask myself questions very often, even audibly) was, "Why Blog?" Well, I guess the answer is that we all have a need to be heard, and sometimes, if only in a handwritten letter, or a typewritten blog, it does the soul good to liberate your thoughts and feelings from the recesses of your mind. So whether you do it in a blog, or shout it in the middle of the grocery store, say what you need to say... I like the idea of blogging because it gives you permission to disagree with me, with my agreement. Get it? If we can agree that we may disagree without devaluing one another’s perspective, then the odds are that we have both learned something new.

Race Matters

So lots of data came out this week suggesting that the achievement gap is closing between black and Latino children and white children. When looking at statistics on achievement gaps, it seems safe to say that empirical data at its best, is subject to skepticism. This is because there is always data beneath the data. Empirical data is stratified; therefore, we are always forced to look at the underlying reasons for the concluding data. If this new data is the result of children being taught to take a standardized test, then the data is contradictory and ambiguous. It fails to prove or disprove anything. The continued racial stratification of the data leaves me confused. Do they believe that race does play a role in education from a perspective of genotype, or do they believe that there are underlying sociological factors that contribute to the way that different races are educated and ultimately affected by educational practices in the United States? We need to do a much better job in presenting data that is conflicting. We should be sure to point out the contradictions and affirm the limitations of the data.

What empirical data fails to capture is the stigma of racism and the achievement deficit it carries. Racism has created a legacy of false expectations and failed hopes that haunt those on the receiving end of negative stereotypes, and it colors the lens through which we view the world. When a people have been failed over and over again by a system, whether the system is education, health care, religion, or economics… people tend to lose hope. They tend to expect the worst, or at the very least, they do not expect the most favorable outcome. They learn to live with disappointment and futility, and sometimes, to expect the worse just represents a shorter fall from disappointment. Racism seems to overpower the majority of criteria that we might otherwise deem pertinent to success. "Researchers Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips say that reducing the black-white test score gap 'would do more to move America toward racial equality than any politically plausible alternative'" They presuppose that smaller classrooms and better trained teachers are an answer to overcoming some of the ills intimated by the data. Grace Kao and ­ Jennifer S. Thompson site the heterogeneity of students in America as a reason to believe that there is no single quick fix and no one model that would suffice to close the achievement gap. Personally I fight against these issues day in and day out. I don’t always want to see the world as tainted, but so often the world seems to see me as tainted. Racism-racial ideology, is just that powerful, and that is beyond my control. What I can control is my desire not to give in, not to allow internal oppression or “oppositional identity” to prevail. I still believe in that now cliche adage, “each one, teach one.” I believe that we can all still make a difference “in spite of” not “because of” the empirical data.

We Need You

An article I read this week, in discussing the possibility of an egalitarian society, states that “the objective of the massed based elite is to replace the power of one minority with that of another.” Personally, I have witnessed this played out in the emergence of the new black middle-class. This group has began to assert its dominance over poor and working poor blacks, and created a new stratification within the ranks of African Americans. One in which the systems that enabled the more highly educated, more affluent blacks to succeed, have been disbanded through a lack of solidarity between African Americans as a whole. It is very much an “us and them” mentality between these groups. In terms of education, there is a general lack of concern among affluent middle classed blacks, about the plight of poor blacks, specifically those who have little to no access to a quality education. Middle class blacks would be more concerned with their own individual, personal access to material wealth, than giving back to the communities, sustaining the social systems, fighting against injustices for poor blacks, in the same spirit of the Civil Rights movement that made their personal success possible. What this does is to undermine the solidarity that made the emergence of middle-class blacks in America possible, and create division in the pursuit of the facade of the American dream. I say facade because even affluent, highly educated blacks come face to face with the fact that success does not erase, or make invisible the stigma of racial stereotypes or discrimination in a racist society like America. There must be, on the part of all groups and members of society, a collective struggle for equality that would lead to the emergence of a qualitatively new society in all areas including education. As the article that inspired this riff states, we need a “prolonged struggle based on hope and a total vision of a qualitatively new society.”