RACIAL EQUALITY: BLACK AMERICANS FALLING BEHIND
work in progress: i was a trustee of saint joseph college, run by the sisters of mercy, ireland; dedicated to helping the poor and disadvantaged students through education. the nuns wanted to ideniify and make room for minorities with higher academic potential without relying on SATs which they believed to be "family income" discriminatory. i remember the consultants showing us the studies of high school averages. 40% of all high school students graduated with an A average. so one is forced to use SATs to discriminate for academic potential among students. unfortunately, the SATs of Black Americans fell 200 points behind other student categories. i remember buying the book "the bell curve" and listening to the media criticize the book as racist. a summary of the bell curve taken from wikipedia is given below. the book should not have been ignored. blacks are academically disadvantaged from the getgo. but why? Black Americans seem to excell in every category they want to: Sports, Theatre, Comedy, Politics, Business. Why not education?
Another disturbing economic indicator: the census bureau recently reported that the poverty rate in the usa rose to 14.3% in 2009, the highest level in 50 years. the number of blacks living below the official poverty line, of $21,756 for a family of four, increased by 7% in one year.
why is it that the blacks suffer so much with outspoken representatives like Rev Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson?
the primary cause, in our opinion: is black culture. if blacks were brought up in jewish homes, they would be A students.
there are two major weakness in black culture;
(1) lack of male role models in education. most black educators that we hear about [like Professor Gates, Harvard University,] focus their attention on reparations rather than educating black children.
(2) teen pregnancy. Black teen pregnancy is the highest in the world, as is total teen pregnancy in the USA. it should be no surprise that white and black americans are traiing many other countries in education. we know that teen pregnancy correlates with lower birth weights, lower academic achievements and lower income levers. [work in progress; refer to file:///C:/Users/joe/Desktop/thanksgiving%20transfer/Teen%20Pregnancy%20statistics,%20signs,%20facts%20teenage%20pregnancy%20prevention.URL]
i also blame the the reverend al sharpton and jesse jackson and their cohorts of racists i also blame the harvard social scientists and their half-assed solutions. i also blame our politicians and their entitlement programs that fail to motivate aspiring blacks. i also blame school integration that stifled so many good black teachers. we need schools for blacks. and they should attend school 6 days a week, including summers. there are 50 minority schools across the nation that do this, and they compete favorably with prep schools on collele entrance admissions.
this probably would be a good idea for whitey who is also falling behind using global standards ******* The New York Times updated 11/9/2010 4:41:51 PM ET 2010-11-09T21:41:51 By Trip Gabriel An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another. But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known. Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys. Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches. The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools. Although the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been previously reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency. “What this clearly shows is that black males who are not eligible for free and reduced-price lunch are doing no better than white males who are poor,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the council. The report shows that black boys on average fall behind from their earliest years. Black mothers have a higher infant mortality rate and black children are twice as likely as whites to live in a home where no parent has a job. In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower. In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008. The analysis of results on the national tests found that math scores in 2009 for black boys were not much different than those for black girls in Grades 4 and 8, but black boys lagged behind Hispanics of both sexes, and they fell behind white boys by at least 30 points, a gap sometimes interpreted as three academic grades. The search for explanations has recently looked at causes besides poverty, and this report may further spur those efforts. “There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.” Those include “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Dr. Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.” The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors. What it does not discuss are policy responses identified with a robust school reform movement that emphasizes closing failing schools, offering charter schools as alternatives and raising the quality of teachers. The report did not go down this road because “there’s not a lot of research to indicate that many of those strategies produce better results,” Mr. Casserly said. Other have a different response. The key to narrowing the achievement gap, said Dr. Ferguson, is “really good teaching.” One large urban school district that has made progress is Baltimore’s, where the dropout rate for African-American boys declined to 4.9 percent during the last academic year, down from 11.9 percent three years earlier. Graduation rates for black boys were also up: 57 percent in 2009-10, compared with 51 percent three years earlier. Andres A. Alonso, the chief executive of the Baltimore City Public Schools, said the improvement had little to do with changes at the margins, like lengthening the school day or adding mentors. Rather, Mr. Alonso cited aggressively closing failing schools, knocking on the doors of dropouts’ homes to lure them back and creating real-time alerts — “almost like an electrical charge” — when a student misses several days of school. “Hispanic kids and African-American kids this year had a lower dropout rate than white kids,” Mr. Alonso said. The Bell Curve is a best-selling but controversial 1994 book by the late Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray. Its central argument is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including financial income, job performance, unwanted pregnancy, and crime than parents' socioeconomic status or education level. Also, the book argues that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence and that this is a dangerous social trend. Most of the controversy concerns Chapters 13 and 14, in which the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discuss the implications of those differences. The authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic, and they did indeed write in chapter 13: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences." The introduction to the chapter more cautiously states, "The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved." The book's title comes from the bell-shaped normal distribution of IQ scores. The normal distribution is the limiting distribution of a random quantity which is the sum of smaller, independent random phenomena. The message in the title is that IQ scores are normally distributed because a person's intelligence is the sum of many small random variations in genetic and environmental factors.[original research?] Shortly after publication, many people rallied both in criticism and defense of the book. Some critics denounced the book and its authors as supporting scientific racism. A number of critical texts, including The Bell Curve Debate, were written in response to the book.
No comments