Anonymous wrote:Guys, if we are arguing with the Alabama woman, we aren't going to win. I had these same endless arguments with my LSU college roommate. A splash of racism, a splash of economic and class insecurity and you have someone who is unable to see 1,000 black teenagers boarding a bus at 5:45 am every day to attend a decent school as they and tehir parents taking responsibility for their education. You have someone so worried about her own children's success that she can't see that parents who look and speak differently than her are also worried about their children's success (albeit with less resources and know-how and . You have someone who can't recognize who being the default, privileged race has benefited her and her family in subtle ways (sometimes just in terms of self- identify - fascinating study about how if back students are told that blacks don't do well on standardized tests before they take one, they do worse than black students who haven't been told that black students don't do well on tests right before they take it). You have someone who won't be able to hear about a school in which ONE (ONE) teacher showed up and taught an academic subject on a day a reporter was following an honor student through the school and not STILL blame the students and parents.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^Agreed. I wish people would really consider these points.

I'm the PP who wrote the supposed best post

Honestly, I think we all enter the ranks of parents of school-aged children with a lot of assumptions about what that experience will be like. The assumptions are informed by our own experiences, our perceptions of the system we're entering, the stories we've heard from other people. They might be relevant, they might not be. I won't lie - the decision to send my white daughter to our neighborhood school - which is high poverty and 99% children of color - was a scary decision. I was not always confident that it was the right decision. I have concerns about how well it will work later. She's entering kindergarten. We've been there for 2 years. Everyone knows that DCPS does early childhood pretty well no matter what school you're at, but everyone also knows that it gets harder as kids matriculate out of the heavily funded Headstart-level programs and into the more academic programs. Everyone knows that the differences I mentioned in home life become more immediate when it becomes expected that learning continue outside the classroom. I imagine that it's probably hard being on either side of bell curve, whether you're disengaged from the instruction because you don't understand it or because you've eclipsed it. I am, however, trying to maintain a generally optimistic attitude about the whole situation, because the problems I'm envisioning down the road haven't happened yet. My future honor student might not be the one eclipsing the material after all. Maybe next year's teacher will be a complete superstar whose students are all reading at grade level, whose students are all engaged with the material and each other.

The thing that bothers me about this conversation is that so many posters seem to believe that these are not complicated problems. They're incredibly complicated problems and blowing that off does not do anyone any good.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

Anonymous wrote:^^Agreed. I wish people would really consider these points.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: Even today with the caste system officially outlawed, are lower castes all given the same opportunities as those in higher castes? This is the closest--although still imperfect--analogy I can get to the experience of AAs here, and the systematic disenfranchisement that they've faced over the years.

Seriously? You're comparing AAs to a caste? What's stopping an AA students from studying really hard and becoming a top student in class and receiving a scholarship to college, like you did? Nothing. Nothing, but his own family and environment at home. That is the real problem.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

The TAL story had more than a 1,000 kids whose parents enforced education to the extent of putting them a bus to ride 30 miles twice a day. How is that not "working for it"?

Putting your kid on the bus is not "working for it".

The reporter didn't tells us what happened after. She didn't say how well the kids did in the new school (besides the honor student, who is an outlier). Were they failing there? Did they improve? Was there violence? Anyone dropped out? Did it affect the grades of the white students? Did it drop the school's rating? Did the enrollment fall?
We don't know. It's a very narrow sighted story.

My DH went through integration in the 70s. When they busing black kids into his white school there was a lot of violence.

The child waking up at 4:00/4:30 am to catch the 5:45am bus is damn sure working for it! And so is the parent making sure that child is up, fed and ready on time to catch the bus!

In the podcast we are told test scores did not decline at the transfer school. The only violence mentioned was about the nasty names one of the white students called one of the AA students. And the reason we don't get further info is b/c the state ended the transfers and had the AA students shipped back to Normandy!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My grandmother was a single mom of 6 kids in rural India. Farming was the only source of income and it was modest income , hard labor, not many resources, no school in the village, no college within 10 miles. All 6 of her kids graduated from college (3 also finished masters). She instilled in them that they must study if they have to break this cycle, this was drilled into them everyday ( back in the 70s). Trust me when I say this, If she and her kids could do this, all AAs in this country can do this , you guys don't know what's it like to not have resources. It's time for personal responsibility people, lift your families, lift your communities on your own shoulders. Barack Obama became president because of the whites in this country, this country is ready for you, it's time to stop blaming the whites.

That's an inspirational story. However, I must point out, as the African immigrant PP and others more eloquently put it--this is apples and oranges we're talking about. The experience of an immigrant coming to this country in the late 20th or 21st century is different from that of people who have lived here for generations under the enduring effects of institutionalized racism.

My dad is Indian, and I could also tell a similar story about how he made it out of his tiny rural town. However, the experience of your grandmother and my father are notable because *they made it out of poverty,* or their kids made it out. This is not necessarily the experience of the many they left behind.

Also, what about the history of the caste system in India, which was propagated during the British colonial regime? Even today with the caste system officially outlawed, are lower castes all given the same opportunities as those in higher castes? This is the closest--although still imperfect--analogy I can get to the experience of AAs here, and the systematic disenfranchisement that they've faced over the years.