Puzzling Racial Gap

The Hartford Courant ^ | Oct 7 2007 | Roger Frahm

[ABN 505]

BLOOMFIELD - A generation ago, Bloomfield was heralded as the all-American community. Blacks and whites lived side by side, chasing the American dream of middle-class stability without regard to skin color. There were trimmed lawns and good schools.

Now, Bloomfield operates one of the most racially segregated school systems in the state. Minority students, mainly black children, account for 95 percent of public school enrollment.

And when results were released recently on the state's annual 10th-grade achievement test, this quiet, middle-class suburb found itself confronting a question more often associated with the nation's poorest urban school systems:

[isrul]

If 95% of public school students are members of a fashionable “muhnority”, where does the racially segregated statement come into play? It would seem that any concern should be directed toward the true minority; the 5% of white children. But, of course, that would never happen.

[VaFarmer]

Almost all serious social scientists KNOW the mechanisms operating to limit success on testing in Detroit area schools.

1. Lower intelligence (in a black or white student) lowers test scores. As neighborhoods change, so does the cognitive ability of the resident families.

2. High entitlement (one variety of self-esteem), whether in a black or white student, lowers achievement because entitlement fosters explanations of success and failure other than intelligence and effort. As a result students with a high sense of personal entitlement seek fairer systems and better outcomes. Gangs are seen as fair by their members, who believe they are getting a better chance in a gang than in a “biased” school system.

3. No reasonable parent leaves a child in a situation in which they will be physically dominated or abused. Add that to flight due to parental search for better neighborhoods and you have an enormous flow of stable and talented kids out of failing schools.

4. Academically talented families, even if we are talking about “a little above average”, do not tolerate academic failure. They change schools, move, tutor or whatever it takes. The residual students in failing schools are a select group, selected because their parents don’t give a damn.

5. Schools routinely address poor performance with efforts to develop “pride.” “Pride” (personal entitlement) in a good student is a pretty good thing. Pride in a bad student is a serious educational (and life) obstacle.

6. Gender issues have broken badly for school-age boys, particularly in elementary school. Boys compete for dominance, driving good students to other schools and bad students into special classes or out of school altogether. A feminized administrative system is fairer for the teachers, fine for elementary school girls, but bewildering and uncontrollable for elementary school boys.

[Pearls Before Swine]

I’ve also wondered why no one questions that 55% of the linemen in the NFL come from 11% of the population.

Linemen? What about cornerbacks?

[Altura Ct.]

“even in historically black colleges.”

Times columnist and editorial board member Bill Maxwell kept a promise to himself, to become a professor at a small historically black college, to nurture needy students the way that mentors had encouraged him as a young man. His second year started with promise but ended in despair.

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/05/20/Opinion/A_dream_lay_dying.shtml/

[Plains Drifter]

Amen!!!