Black students in Cali: only 20% pass MATH state test, 33% pass READING test

[Brer Dog]

Was not expecting these replies when i came in here

African American culture is toxic and backwards. Literally do a scan of the type of threads that do numbers in TLR on the daily and it ain’t hard to see why.

What does this have to do with AAs? This is a mixed forum. AAs don't even make up the majority from I've seen. They're just the largest minority.

 

[KingJudah2]

Yankee Kids dont give a fukk about education, mix that with yankee parents who treat school as free day-care and this what you get

Not to mention bad teachers

fixed

 

[Wear My Dawg's Hat]

He promoted Anti intellectualism for fast money. The early 90s was when the "keep in it real" nonsense got pushed as the forefront of black youth culture, right after they got did of Public Enemy and black power music.

The cultural handoff from Public Enemy and KRS-One to NWA and Death Row was the first sign of the crash.

 

[Will Ross]

The cultural handoff from Public Enemy and KRS-One to NWA and Death Row was the first sign the of crash.

Naw things went down hill in the 70’s

 

[⠝⠕⠏⠑]

I think you avoided answering my question. YOU stated that it's impractical to think that you can force parents to take advantage of existing resources. I've said that ANY change....internal family practices and external systemic changes would be lead by the same people. The parents.
Apathy about changing those internal things is directly correlated to the type of apathy towards fighting for thoese external changes.

There is no way around that. Nobody has more vested interest in making those changes than the actual parents. The ones who are committed to making those changes will be lone voices amidst a sea of silent, uninvolved, unengaged parents.

NOW...what these GREAT parents eventually figure out is that WHILE they are fighting to change laws,rules,curricula ...that they better locate and take advantage of resources for THEIR children. It's not either / or and it never has been.

Have you spoken to all blk families to be able to label them apathetic? Have u worked with blk families for over 12 years in poor blk communities?

These are stereotypes. The same issues plaguing our students are the same issues plaguing the families of their students. Poverty, racism, lack of opportunities and in this case, racist legislation that has been trying to overturn Brown vs Board of Education.

The crazy thing about the results of these studies is most blk children tested don’t even go to the same schools with the same teachers, resources, funding, after school and tutoring opportunities, and those children certainly aren’t getting targeted for exclusionary discipline in the same way. There is no comparison.

The disparities are so stark that even our federal government has acknowledged them, and they have little to do with what blk families are or aren’t doing.

Please do whatever u can to save the culture and I’ll keep doing what I’m doing to change the system, school by school, district by district.
I don’t have the luxury of ensuring all the blk families who send their children to my teachers are like non-blk parents. But luckily I’m not focused on that anyway. My focus is what the fukk is going wrong when they step into that classroom being funded by millions of taxpayer dollars.

Do u and I’ll do me and we will meet in the middle.

 

[Wear My Dawg's Hat]

Naw things went down hill in the 70’s

Name the 1970s Billboard Top 10 Album group with the term "nikkaz" in their name, and I'll agree with you.

 

[Will Ross]

Name the 1970s Billboard Top 10 Album group with the term "nikkaz" in their name, and I'll agree with you.

Things was done more though video than music in the past. Movies like superfly was a huge influence on brothers in the 70’s

 

[Depreciating Asset]

Reasons for this:

1.) Thanks Conservatives! No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) made draconian regulations on and emphasis on high-stakes testing. Accountability is great but that’s not the real reason they did it.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bu...ancy/no-child-left-behind-gold-rush-continues
Always. Follow. The. Money.

The results? Keep reading below

2.) Testing inflation. The more u have of it, the less valuable it is to the recipient.

Blk students are particularly impacted by this. The overemphasis on testing drew educators away from explicit direct instruction, project based learning, creative engaging lessons, unit planning and replaced it with kill and drill instruction and testing, testing, testing.
Average student will take 4 quarterly tests in each subject area, a MAP test in math and reading, END of Year tests in reading, science and math, PLUS individual teacher made tests in each class weekly. All so that teachers can be “data-driven” in their instruction.
But they don’t even have time to analyze all the testing data so really, it’s testing just to test. And everything that makes school transformative and engaging particularly for blk students is replaced with this environment. Many kids can read but literally write “fukk u” on the tests or bubble in anything and put their heads on the desks. After all, there is no incentive or value in these tests and they take so many of them.

3.) Changes in Instruction- We went from teaching phonemic awareness to “whole language”. Misunderstandings of these reading philosophies resulted in teachers looking for quick fixes instead of systematic reading instruction. Of course high teacher turnover rates and inexperienced teachers contributed to this. In short Little Bobby is no longer taught to read by learning how to break down multisyllabic words or recognize phonemes and dipthongs and digraphs or prefixes and suffixes. Instead he is taught to memorize sight words or a list of most commonly used words in the English language. Kinda hard to decipher complex texts without an understanding of the fundamentals.

There’s more to this but that’s just a start!

There is a lot of truth here.

Yeah I figured as much but the research speaks for itself. Even blk kids from affluent families are still suffering in this school system.

The most immediate fixes I’ve seen work is blk leaders, community advocates, and families raising hell at local school board meetings about their schools. My major takeaway from my research is that outside of homeschooling or removing kids to charter schools, state local legislation has to be forced by parents and community stakeholders to improve schools.

Sure we should inform blk families of ways to improve their involvement with their children at the individual levels, but those gains won’t help if their children are still being suspended or if they attending schools with inexperienced teachers.

Agree with all this. But the fact is that if we know that the system is broken, why are we still relying on the system? I know K-12 education is compulsory but a true community movement to educate our children outside of the system from the age of 1 years old (I kid you not) is the only way forward. We have to figure out how to utilize the cheap technology available to supplement the curriculum and create a massive tutoring program which can mirror the tutoring that affluent Asian parents pay for. And we must start way before kindergarten.

There is not enough money in the education system to fund a highly effective teacher in every classroom even before all of the obstacles that you mentioned. We are the solution in our own families and in our own communities. I see no other long term viable plan forward.

 

[Depreciating Asset]

Combination of a lot of things from my experience in the school system:

-Lack of parent accountability and involvement, of course. Go to conferences and compare the number of students in a classroom (which is WAY too many) to the number of parents showing up to discuss their student's progress.

-The student/teacher ratio leads to every student not getting the attention they need. Combine that with the vastly different learning levels you encounter in a single classroom. The more intermediate-advanced students will stay on level or progress while the students that need to catch up are more likely to continue to fall behind.

The result of this and the push for inclusion is you've got students at lower-levels getting frustrated and distracted. That turns into acting out/disrupting class. Managing those disruptions interrupt learning and the domino effect sets the class behind because many administrations will refuse to remove the student from the class.

-They keep pushing students through regardless of their levels, so you've got kids that missed the basic building blocks getting passed on from middle to high school and so on. A student may get to their junior year and they only read at an elementary level, but they'll get pushed through the entire time and the scores will reflect this throughout their academic career.

The entire system is deeply flawed. In my opinion, it definitely starts at home, but it's all a mess.

As a parent, if my child can't read, can't think critically, can't understand fractions or algebra, that is ultimately MY responsibility. I am not going to trust an educational entity to do this any more than I trust McDonald's to ensure that I am eating healthy food. It is a lot of work to make sure that your child is prepared for the world but I see that as my job at the end of the day. If they are not prepared, I am blame for that so I take that responsibility seriously and so should every other parent.

 

[ISO]

White kids still have books, and unit plans, and project based learning, and science fairs and field trips, and an emphasis on the arts.

Black students are funneled into depressing schools, with new inexperienced white teachers who don’t have thousand dollar curriculums or money for authentic learning experiences and experiments and are less likely to utilize the constructivist learning strategies that improve student engagement, nor do they have the experience to provide explicit instruction for struggling learners. So they fall back on worksheets, drills and lectures. When this doesn’t work and students get bored and off task or they hate school, our system created this problem.

During my last year of teaching my middle schoolers went three years without one outside learning experience. I’m not advocating for surface level stereotypes of funneling knowledge thru hip hop and basketball to get blk kids interested. I’m talking about a lack of educational quality that is unconstitutional that blks literally protested against.

School quality and upward mobility are inextricably connected. Black family structure CAN’T improve without better schools, and better schools can’t happen unless we understand how Brown vs. Board of Education has been underminded by racist legislation resulting in inequitable education disparities for blk kids in our school system.

But if you all have solutions on how the blk family can magically restore itself outside of the one tried and true social economic vehicle of education and our continued efforts to reform it, I’m all ears.

Breh, like I said I'm from New York state. I can only speak on my experience as a student in the NYC public school system and the little work I've done in education in Buffalo, New York at various schools.

Like I said we have state mandated learning modules that require extensive unit plans, we had a nice sized library, we had a pantry in the school, we had extra school uniforms, we had laptops for every student, SmartBoards in every room, various classroom management techniques, we had a salad bar in lunch, we had breakfast every day mandated in a 30 minute block, after school programs and athletics, Saturday academy, field trips both for leisure and to supplement learning although I would like to see more but the school year can be hectic, we had art and music with several plays and performances. Not all the teachers were young Teach for America cacs. I worked with a handful of black teachers mostly ADOS, one was Kenyan, the other Puerto Rican. Even the white teachers who were the majority some were fresh out of school but others were respected by the students, veteran, middle aged cac teachers. Many schools have taken the measures that you have named to close the achievement gap the pedagogical stuff you're citing is nothing new. Although the school has improved in the last decade it is still failing miserably.

Anyway how did you pivot into curriculum writing and education consultation? Based off what you saying you're basically something like Colvin from The Wire

 

[KingJay]

Take your child's education into your own hands. My mother used to do simple math with me and read to me a good bit from a very young age, and that tuned my brain to those fields. As they get older, the math will come easily, and continue to push and develop that love of reading and learning. I think that changed the trajectory of my academic success throughout life more so than me just being some naturally gifted person in any of these fields.

 

[kwazzy100]

Who has time for all that when you working a bunch of bs jobs trying to make ends meet?

If anything, make sure your kids likes to socialize and play outdoors than he does indoors. They'll get hobbies that way.
Or just dont buy a TV and give them books to read.

 

[CarmelBarbie]

There’s so much I could add to this, as I wrote many articles about the education system and black children during grad school a few years ago. It’s a combination of factors and actually pretty sad. Everything from numerous holes in school system structure that primarily work as disadvantage to black students, curriculum not relatable(I mean the great fukking Gabtsy and many American classics that we are forced to read about past time white culture) teachers—oh lord I could really do multiple essays on this one, because I interviewed many in grad school for the reporting I was doing on public schools and black students, parenting—another issue and it’s a little more complicated, cultural differences that play a role in the classroom, behavioral/class room management, etc, etc. it’s a whole got damn mess. I see so many great responses in this thread that all illustrate the many challenges and sides to this. It’s so unfortunate and down right scary when we consider the future. Our kids are the future...

 

[Samori Toure]

Was not expecting these replies when i came in here

What does this have to do with AAs? This is a mixed forum. AAs don't even make up the majority from I've seen. They're just the largest minority.

All you need to do is just take note of what ethnic group the people are that talk the most shyt about African Americans. Once you know that then you can smirk and move on. They are also the same ones trying to latch on to African American culture.

 

[InkosiYe]

Great. I covered this before tho. What’s gonna happen first, the strides Marian Edelman Wright made with the Children’s Defense Fund and Freedom Schools, helping to pressure leaders to change local school leadership, or fixing 40 plus years of oppression that LED to the blk family being the way it is.

You are fingerwagging but not offering any solutions. As someone working in educational research and policy, doing what u say is like waiting on the world to change.

And we already doing it. We already addressing the poverty and circumstances of poor blk families that impact achievement gaps

You've literally offered a solution that speaks to my point right there. That 30 million words program sounds excellent and that's EXACTLY the type of thing that needs to be happening more in low income households. But it starts with fully educating the parent about how to get involved with their child's learning process, and having them buy in, and then afterwards the parent can be a major driving force in the kid's success, regardless of what they're doing in the classroom.

But clutching pearls alone and acting like family is the sole factor and IGNORING teacher quality being a primary factor in blk child success is stupid and misguided and continues to allow our taxpayer dollars to go to waste.

I'll ignore the insults and stick to constructive convo for now since this actually interests me, but I've already said in this thread that BOTH family involvement and changing the system need to be a part of the equation so I'm not quite sure where you're going here. My main issue was that on the flip side, you seemed to almost completely disregard the parental aspect with all of these studies of black children needing to be taught differently to learn and reacting to being told no etc. etc. I think that's a major misstep because a strong parental influence can have a HUGE influence on a child's success, even if it takes going the home-schooling route. I mean, that 30 million words video literally speaks DIRECTLY to that point, because a lot of the learning kids are doing is taking place before they even step foot in a classroom. But based on what I'm seeing here hopefully we're not as far off on that point as I thought.

So, let’s here some real practical solutions other than “Dey need to be better wit Dey kids!”

How can we facilitate that? Like action plans to change blk families. Let’s go! I’m excited!

Programs like 30 million words, but it NEEDS to take advantage of social media. @Get These Nets had a good suggestion as far as having parents take kids to a free library, but it seemed like you were saying that's too much to do, in which case I'd say two things probably need to happen:

1. Parents need to be convinced to buy in on the importance of working with their kids, and be given the tools to do so
2. You need to make it free and easy to access (Youtube)

I think you can use social media to help with getting previously uninvolved parents to buy in, as well as actually providing the learning materials online as well. Some folks might just be terrible parents and there's not much you'll be able to do about it, but some folks just might not really be educated on how important it is. Like when What the Health dropped I knew at least 15 people who previously didn't give a shyt about nutrition who got scared straight into trying Veganism. Or even take the ADOS movement, there's people on this very message board that were on some whole other shyt until that movement started going viral, and now they're all in. And it was started by basically two little known social media members and Tariq Nasheed. Social media is free and can be incredibly powerful. If you can create a compelling social media campaign that explains to black parents just how important it is to have a higher level of involvement in their kids education I think that can reach alot of people. I mean if Veganism and black politics can pop off why not education? What could be more important to the average parent than their kids? Whether that's through documentaries, using IG & Twitter influencers, whatever, as long as the message gets out there. Everybody doesn't live in Chicago so that 30 million words program can only affect so much, but there's no reason something like that can't be done at scale online.


Now as an added addendum, I have a question. As far as the black kids that come from upwardly mobile families but are still performing at a level equivalent to low income whites, what do the studies say about black male vs black female achievement in that group? Because I grew up in a diverse middle class suburb and school system, but in my experience I was almost always one of two AT MOST black males in the majority of my honors/ap classes. Plenty of black women though. Furthermore, I know dudes who had both parents in their life and their parents were making more money than mine, (my fam was college educated solidly middle class, not upper middle at all), but yet these were the main motherfukkers on some gang shyt, cutting school to get the new Jordan's, fighting in gym class and in the hallways, all kinds of dumb shyt. This is shyt I witnessed with my own eyes, I saw way too many male New New's. So based on MY experience, I suppose you could have some counselors tracking their progress and stay on top of them but I personally knew a lot of these types that shouldn't have even needed that. What they needed was to stop trying to be "real" and handle their business .

And to me the discrepancy between male and female achievement that I witnessed in this particular middle class scenario is an indictment on the culture and what a lot of young black men are led to believe is "cool".