Make excellence a 'black thing'
Atlanta Journal-Constitution ^ | November 2, 2003
Cynthia Tucker
If I were a high school student with lackluster SATs, I'd take no comfort from those who defend my mediocre academic work accomplishment as an unfortunate characteristic of my race.
I'd be offended by the fact that the HOPE scholarship controversy has become another forum for repeating the ancient wisdom that black students simply don't perform well on standardized tests.
I'd be embarrassed by black lawmakers who threaten to go to court to protect my right to receive HOPE, even though my scores don't measure up to those of most white students.
I think I'd want to prove them wrong. I think I'd give up TV and take as many advanced placement classes and spend as many hours with a math tutor as necessary to raise my SATs. That's what I'd do.
Will black children around the state respond that way? Or will they merely sink back into a fatalism that will guarantee the outcome -- poor test scores -- that has been forecast for them?
It has been nearly 50 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed the concept of separate but equal schools. Five decades should have been enough time to erase the effects of outdated textbooks, poorly trained teachers and even low expectations on the academic achievements of black children. Unfortunately, black scholarship -- at least as measured by SATs and ACTs, the two most popular tests for college entrance -- still lags behind that of whites.
The HOPE scholarship debate has brought that unfortunate reality front and center once again. Faced with soaring demand, Georgia officials predict that HOPE funds will start to run short by 2005. To save money, Gov. Sonny Perdue and others have recommended that HOPE eligibility be tied to SATs, rather than grades, which are affected by teachers' subjectivity (and inability to resist parental pressure). Perdue wants to award HOPE scholarships to students who score at least 1000.
But that recommendation has run smack into the achievement gap. Sixty-seven percent of the state's black HOPE scholars score below 1000, while only 32 percent of white HOPE scholars do that poorly.
(Overall, nearly 40 percent the state's HOPE scholars score below 1000 on the SATs -- which is, as much as anything, a stunning indictment of the state's educational system. The perfect score is 1600; most of the nation's competitive colleges and universities require at least 1200. How can students have B averages and score less than 1000?)
Academic researchers used to believe that poverty condemned students to mediocre test scores. Indeed, there is a direct correlation between family income and test scores: the higher the family income, the higher the student is likely to score, generally. But researchers have also found that a white student from a family earning $75,000 a year will still score higher than a black student from a family earning $75,000 a year. What creates that gap?
The late John Ogbu, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, did groundbreaking research that yielded a fascinating, if controversial, conclusion. Studying black students in Shaker Heights, Ohio, long acclaimed for its outstanding public schools, Ogbu concluded, "Black students did not generally work hard. In fact, most appeared to be characterized by low-effort syndrome. . . . The amount of time and effort they invested in academic pursuit was neither adequate nor impressive. . . . The [black] students themselves knew and admitted this."
Georgia has an obligation to improve its pathetic school system, which has suffered from low expectations for generations. In rural school systems, few white students score above 1000 on the SATs, as Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor has noted. It would be quite unfair for the state to suddenly change the rules for HOPE when it has not spent the money nor instituted the standards to teach Georgia's students what they need to know.
But it is black parents who are responsible for insisting that their own children hit the books and take school seriously. Too many black children dismiss scholarship as "a white thing." That has to end. Surely it is more embarrassing to be considered dumb than to be considered "white."
Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1012640/posts
And from the associate editor Jim Wooten also with the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Fix families, then schools
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ^ | Feburary 22, 2004 |
Jim Wooten
A conscientious federal judge, examining whether a rural Georgia school district discriminates racially because racial imbalances are observable, closed the books with a pained commentary.
The Thomasville school district does not discriminate on the basis of race, despite the imbalance of black children in special education or gifted programs, ruled U.S. District Court Judge Clay D. Land of Columbus. What he found, however, is that poor children "are still waiting on the promise" of equal education opportunity.
In agonized social commentary on public education, Land lamented that the promise has not been fulfilled "for many children who find themselves trapped in an educational system that cannot meet their needs. . . . We can communicate with someone on the other side of the globe with the click of a finger. Yet, we have trouble teaching a poor child to read or do arithmetic.
"No matter how tempted the court may be to intervene and attempt to 'fix the system,' a court is ill-equipped for such a task. Moreover, it does not have the authority to act as a super-school board or social scientist, even if it was arrogant enough to believe that it possessed the ability."
There's no constitutional guarantee, nor accepted principle of federal law, mandating high-quality education for the poor, he noted. Elected officials decide the extent of education opportunity available.
"Those who have no political voice must depend on those who do. While it is truly regrettable that this voice is too often muffled in the political process, its silence cannot authorize intervention by the federal courts absent a violation of federal law."
Land's "final thoughts," as he labeled them, invite reflection. These observations are mine, not his:
Public education has become so burdened with mandates, litigation, politics and social problems dropped at its doorstep that it is in major distress. This is not the system we would invent now.
We'd build one around choice, like-minded parents and educators who agree on what children need and how they are to be taught, one school at a time.
We'd allow parents to buy education services just as they do medical services, from any able provider they choose. That's part of the fix.
The other is marriage and the family. Only three of 10 black children are born to intact families. New research data reported by University of Chicago economics professor James J. Heckman and University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy L. Wax on racial disparities in education make the connection.
"Young black children lag significantly in school readiness before traditional school programs and expectations of discrimination could have much effect. Black underachievement, especially among males, is present even in the best schools and is only weakly correlated with indicators of school quality, such as per-student expenditures, class size or racial composition."
The explanation is probably not poor schools, poverty, low teacher expectations, excessive school discipline, nor anticipated discrimination, they write.
What, then, explains the gap? "The most important influences on young children's development are family, home and immediate social circle." Young black children watch more TV, read fewer books and converse and go on educational outings with families less often. And "they are more likely to be raised in homes without fathers, family mealtimes or fixed routines."
By the time children get to school, it's almost too late. To fix the schools, we have to fix the families -- starting six years and nine months before the children get there.
In the meantime, we do have to give the poor the financial means to break the cycle, to get their children into the education environments they need. Reward parents for caring and being responsible. Give them choice.
Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1082553/posts
Phony! Stinking, rotten phony! She's all about raising the minimum wage in her April piece criticizing Cynthia McKinney:
If you're going to call a press conference and muster such prominent supporters as Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, you ought to be sure the issue is important enough to command national attention. You should save that sort of clarion call for the most serious matters -- renewing the Voting Rights Act or raising the minimum wage so that more black men can support their children.
and this from November of last year in which she blasted Republicans:
The GOP, of course, has done nothing of the sort. As lackeys of the big-business, wealthy-investor class (or charter members of it), congressional Republicans have done everything in their power to make the lives of working folks worse. They've resisted an increase in the minimum wage; they've squeezed Medicaid; they've championed tax cuts for the richest Americans and a plan to make Social Security checks less reliable.
But when the money is coming out of her pocket, suddenly $6 is more than enough. Despite column after column on how America is racist, the $6 is more than enough for her downtrodden brothers. Why? Because she's paying the freight.
P-H-O-N-Y! Bleeping PHONY!
My past experience with Cynthia is that she "gets it" on about one op-ed out of ten. Then she reverts to knee-jerk Lefty form.
You take what you can get, I suppose.
Uh Cynthia baby see what you wrote above.
The armed forces seek high school graduates with decent reading and math skills to operate high-tech gizmos.
So do manufacturers. So do most every other person who is seeking to hire for any job including janitor. Part of the reason the manufacturing base is struggling is that finding workers who can read enough to tell the difference between sodium chloride and sodium carbonate becoming more difficult.
If you can't read you are not going to get a good paying job. If you can not be counted on to show up then you aren't going to get the low paying ones either.
Stereotypes are usually there for a reason.
More illegals is not the answer to this problem. Our total job market and economy are being eroded by the illegal problem, and anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what they are talking about.
I would bet anything that all the idle blacks have absentee or no fathers, and the hard workers have great fathers. (Tiger Woods had a great father).
The only thing on offer to make black kids students is black parents working like Asian parents to take the option of not being a student off the table for their kids. And the public policy implication of that is simply that the parents must be empowered with vouchers - and left to sink or swim. Parents must know that the schollarship, or lack of schollarship, of their children is on them.Too many black children dismiss scholarship as "a white thing." That has to end. Surely it is more embarrassing to be considered dumb than to be considered "white."Because in the final analysis no other adult cares about a particular child like that child's parents. Anybody who tells you any different is selling something.
Evidently not. Solidarity - mutual reinforcing of scapegoating and excuse-making - certainly is an important human characteristic. Indeed it takes something like a Bible-believing worldview to motivate people to hold themselves to absolute standards rather than the far more comfortable "I'm not as bad as George" relative standard.But of course that is what created the whole school-bussing frenzy in the 1970s - if you take one black child out of a ghetto and put him in a class of white students, that one black child will be under enough social pressure to stand a chance of becoming a student himself. Once you know that, you're only a misstep away from the Coleman Report fallacy.
So if one is good, two must be better - and if you send bus loads of ghetto kids into a white school, that busload of kids will be more comfortable than the single black kid was, and still will get the benefit of being with white students and become students themselves, right? Not only that, but in return you bus a few white students into a ghetto school that will turn all the kids in the ghetto school into students. Right?
Of course attributing magical powers to white kids is pure racism, but black parents somehow bought it. Well, why wouldn't they? Nothing else was then on offer as a way to turn their kids into students - nothing else is on offer to turn their kids into students even now. At least nothing that a politician can accept and remain a Democrat in good standing.
All of this is a symptom of the pathologies affecting that community, where if you're not a "playa," you're a chump.
Pushed by whom, Cynthia? Whitey? Society? The Man?
And to think I was right with her - cheering her on for her observations despite the admission that she's a cheapskate boss...right up to the point where she kicks "personal responsibility" out the door.
Uh, no
Typically the military rejects about 30% to 40% of recruits. This was the case during the Kennedy Administration (he was concerned about it) and it is the case now. Read Moskos; at one time the average Ivy League male served in uniform. Lazy folks don't do well in the military.
Another class completed in Cynthia Tucker's education. Will she complete her course or will she rebel at the truth and dump it all in the trash at some point? I seem to remember Wm Raspberry going through that learning curve some years ago then suddenly it came to an end and then it was as if it never happened.
.....How did this happen?.....
Quite simply, many black boys made a consicious decision to not participate in society. They decided to shun a world that required mental effort and work.They chose a world where they need do anything.
There should be no tears for them as worthless adults. They are worthless by choice.
Black unemployment, teenage pregnancy, dropouts and black victemology are solved (albeit over time) when other blacks no longer find the behavior acceptable.
Saying that they are being "pushed" implies that it is someone else's fault. They embrace the Jackson-Sharpton-Farrakhan culture of victimhood and find it easier to cling to that than to accept education, effort, honesty and hard work as an alternative.
The whole "culture" needs to be reworked from the ground up. Bill Cosby needs to give them a good smack up side the head!
This is the direct result of the feminists within socialism. In their spiteful view, women do not need husbands. The state substitutes as the family provider. In one generation the system is set up with socialist elites who administer the social-welfare complex, dumbed down fat black women who can't hold onto any remaining good men to provide a solid family unit, and politicians who promise to save them by administering more of the same socialist poison. It's not really complicated. The men are assured that aimlessness, drifting from woman to woman, beating each other, and stealing from whitey are virtues.
I'm sitting outside the Post Office in my car reading my fresh copy of Mix when a lanky black guy comes up and goes into the usual convoluted 'none-of-this-is-my-fault' preamble to asking for money. Impatient, I say "just give it to me straight, pal".
At the point that I said that I looked at him and was struck by the fact that he DIDN'T fit the profile. I have been importuned by many of the Dinkins hordes during the troubles and I KNOW straight from phoney.
In fact some mornings there is a hulking, lantern-jawed drug addict (white guy) who conciously use intimidation tucked into humble tones to ask for money. I don't give him dime one, but this dude at the Post Office seemed on the level. I told him to forget looking for a job as he was out-bid (he knew what I was talking about). I told him I was forced for the same reason to go into business for myself and that that was his best (only)option.
I gave him 30 bucks and wished him a Happy Easter.
Academic achievement is "too white".
Manual labor is for "slaves".
Many black male students leave themselves few options other than perhaps becoming professional athletes or rap stars, and they don't realize how low the odds are of being successful in those careers.
Has she ever heard of the "Bell Curve"?