Had they been white girls would you have mentioned their color?
I didn't write it. And yes it probably would have been mentioned.
Obviously, I don't know PKM's kid, so I can't speculate about what his thought process might be. I can relate something similar from a friend who is a professor at a small Christian college.
The enrollment at this college is largely minority, and he's run into many young people who are similar to the young ladies mentioned in the original post. They are intelligent and have a real interest in learning, but no one has ever challenged them to get things right. The young people who fit this description come from a variety of demographic backgrounds, but this combination seems to be more prevalent among blacks. I don't remember him using this phrase, but when he describes the situation, I'm reminded of President Bush's criticism of "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
I've heard of the problem of many black people looking down on educational achievement. At one time, some writers claimed that studying was considered "acting white" among blacks in school. In my experiences with blacks, I've never seen this attitude, but I don't deny that it could be real in some circles.
Mentioning the race of the young ladies in question may be most relevant because blacks felt so strongly that Clinton was going to help them in education. Many of them really believed that he would "do something" to erase the performance gap between them and the white kids in the suburbs. The fact that these young people whose formative school years were during the Clinton administration didn't learn the basics is more evidence that Clinton failed those who trusted him most.
Ultimately, I still believe that parental involvement will be the biggest factor in a kid's educational success. Either the parent makes learning a priority or not. If the parents don't make learning a priority, most kids won't recognize the value of education until they've lost their best opportunities. If the parents make learning a high priority, they can offset many weaknesses in the schools.
Bill
Well, I have to come to his defense, although the problem cannot be laid at Clinton's door. Many moons ago, when Bill Clinton was busy not-inhaling, I taught a catch-up class to first year Black law students at a highly competitive law school. They were amongst the first of the folks who had gone thru the education system as affirmative action students. The idea was to give them extra help in the most difficult first-year subjects.
My class started as a class in civil procedure. My students were, for the most part, bright and (from classroom dialog) understood the material.
Then I gave my first test--an essay test. I got back about 25 essays.
They were completely incoherent. By that, I'm not being cute. I mean, quite precisely, that I could not figure out what they were trying to say. Sentences were incomplete. Some of the misspellings were laughable. I couldn't buy a paragraph. And this applied across the board, including the smart ones who knew the material well.
I immediately changed the class into a basic English writing skills class (every class, we wrote about civil procedure ad nauseum) and most of my kids passed. There were no budding Charles Dickens that emerged. But, by the end of the year, you could understand what they were communicating and the paragraphs and sentences were more or less intact.
These kids had not been taught how to write, even though they were the cream of the crop amongst black students in their age bracket. All had graduated from a top undergraduate school. The white kids in their school did not share this disability.
All it took was one year of teaching the craft of a complete sentence and why we have paragraphs--and then expecting them to write better. In all but a few instances, it worked. Spelling, well . . . it's harder.
Our school system failed these kids miserably and it failed them because the system was determined to produce black graduates from top colleges. So they just got passed on thru, even though they could not write.
Then they hit Boalt, which does blind grading (the prof doesn't know who wrote the test) on a rigid curve. And, all the tests were essays. Whoops. Sixty-plus percent failure rate in the first year, which is appalling.
So maybe the original poster's comment was gratuitous. But this is a special problem in the era of affirmative action for minority students. The school system is serving its own statistics, not the students.
It would be interesting to know which race students are seeking assistance most frequently.