Reply to This American Life about desegregation in schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to a catholic school with underpaid teachers,  no playground- we played on the parking lot, school books that were clearly very used,  a school gym from the 1950s and hadn't been updated since,  an antiquated science lab (only in high school),  33 childten per class with one teacher-i could go on.  There was a waiting list to get in!
If the parents aren't enforcing discipline at home,  and the students come to school not ready to learn and follow directions,  of course it's a recipe for failure.  Why can't majority minority schools be a place were people want to come?  If the students are performing at high levels,  they will come.[/quote]

I went to school in Soviet Russia.  We were poor.  I had one uniform I would wear all year long.  Shoes were a birthday present.  We didn't have toiletries like shower gels or tampax. We wore second hand clothes from previous generations, like my grandmother's, mothers.  We didn't have a car. My parents would save all their life to buy some basic cheap particleboard furniture.  Food was hard to come buy, you hand to stay in long lines for a chance to buy some meat.

The school was very modest.  We did not have a playground, no labs,  no library, no snacks, no field trips, no fancy supplies like markers, just pens and pencils, no fancy posters on the walls.  Our books were second hand from previous classes. We also had 30 kids in a class and 1 teacher.  Some teachers were terrible.  Homework took hours.  Yet we didn't have a single drop out.  All my class went to college.

This was the not the worst.  My mother had a much worse situation after the end of the WWII, when Russia was ruined and poverty was unbelievable.  Her whole generation was one of the best educated in the world, they all had degrees.

My grandmother also had even worse.  She had to hike 4 miles through the woods to the nearest school starting age 6, they lived out in the country.  I'm not even going to go into how poor she was when the WWII started.  She was always hungry and sleep deprived.  She finished college.  So did her generation and they sent people to space and made amazing technological progress.

So I find it hard to accept poverty as an excuse for AA students' situation.[/quote]

I think it's really interesting that so many posters on this thread are unable to relate to anything other than their own experience. As if because you had an experience in the Soviet Union, the actual, stated experiences of other people are not valid, and the explanations (well documented and supported by research) cannot possibly be valid because they do not mesh with your beliefs about how you and yours escaped your own cycle of poverty.

Racism in housing policies is real. While one might argue that there is no longer such an active policy to prevent Black people from living in certain parts of town, the legacies of previous policies is very much in attendance. Discrimination in employment is also real. There are laws enacted to actively prevent discrimination, but those laws have not eliminated the more subtle forms of discrimination. Discrimination within the education system is also real. You can talk about test scores and crime rates all you want. You can say that you'd say those things about any student who tests poorly and behaves badly, regardless of their skin color, but you're not going to receive much opportunity to do that, because in this city, the White kids go to private school or they go to school in upper NW - both of which are predicated on a certain level of income. I know that person such as yourself understands the every day difficulties associated with poverty, so I'm not going to insult you by listing them, provided that you do me the courtesy of not denying their existence.

My child goes to a Title 1 school in DC. I am intimately familiar with the complicated and toxic cocktail of factors that result in poor test scores and a lot of behavior issues. Saying "It's just racism" is missing the point, because it's not just racism. It's generations of racism. It's generations of poverty. It's living in a city with a huge wealth divide, that is incredibly segregated. It's coming from homes where one or both parents work more than full time at low-skilled jobs just to pay the bills. It's coming from homes where one or both parents may not be fluent in English, which remains an obstacle, particularly for things like literacy.

When people say, "Where are the parents? Why are they not teaching their children?" they are both correct and completely missing the point. Your parents and mine had educational role models. Someone, at some point, instilled in them the belief that education is what will help break the cycle of poverty, that it might actually be the only thing. Not everyone has had that message, for a lot of different reasons. In this country, the reality is that people of color were not ALLOWED to go to school for a long time. When they were allowed, their schools were terrible and the assumption was that they would ultimately end up as domestic employees or manual laborers. Their education was treated as irrelevant. When you give a person THAT message regularly, they will start to believe it. Then they will live out that prophesy. Then they will have children and the cycle will perpetuate itself.

There is someone on this thread who keeps mentioning that the honor student in Normandy is an outlier, with the undertone that because of this, we should discount her story as being something that is not germane to the broader conversation. That is incorrect, and it assumes that children who grow up poor and Black are unteachable, that their education is irrelevant because no matter what you do, the ones who succeed will be "outliers." Please consider the strong messages about the importance of education and then consider that the "outlier" stories are part of that message. [/quote]
This is probably the best post on the whole damn thread.[/quote]

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