Sociology 3901: Outline--Week Ten
II. Groups.
Two competing views of current racial gap in educational achievement, whether measured by high school graduation rates or college graduation rates: Thernstrom and Thernstrom vs. Kozol (these authors representative of a larger division between "conservatives" (stressing family effects) vs "liberals" (stressing community and school effects)... we'll be reading Kozol but using the Thernstroms to raise questions about Kozol
III. Thernstrom and Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, 2004
A. Preface. Important overview. Key claims include the following:
1. Black high school graduation rate has doubled since 1960 (when integration ordered by Brown v Board of Education really began to happen). College attendance and college graduation rates for blacks have also risen dramatically. (Hispanic trends similar, but somewhat disguised by high rate of immigration)
2. The gap between black and white on academic achievement (as measured by tests) was decreasing until about 1988, but since then it has been growing. (Did something happen to black families in 1988 or did it relate to something happening in schools?.... Kozol/Orfield will argue that by this time, the schools were on their way to resegregation. )
3. Student with equal skills and knowledge will have roughly equal incomes (they acknowledge that this was very much not the case in the past).
4. Therefore skills and knowledge the key to racial equality.
5. Family expectations (family culture) a crucial component in academic achievement. Most apparent with Asian Americans, who show much more commitment to academic work than any other group, including whites. Latino families often put much less emphasis on schooling, and black kids arrive in school less prepared and are less ready to conform to behavioral demands.
6. This is the key factor in the racial gap; the second key factor is academic culture and teacher quality (which go hand in hand).
7. The elements of the federal No Child Left Behind program probably will not in themselves close the gap; Texas and North Carolina were first to implement thse procedures and the gap has not diminished in those states.
8. "Most important, the enormous power of teachers unions stops almost all real change in its tracks." (This is the most overtly political claim in this first chapter.)
B. Chapter One: The Problem
1. The best evidence about what children are learning comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, given to representative samples of American fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade students since 1969.
2. In reading, math, history, and geography, mean scores for black and Latino students in 12th grade are comparable to white and Asian scores in 8th grade. Across all 7 subject areas, the percent of whites scoring below "basic" in 12th grade is about 20%; for blacks, more than half score below 'basic." Scores at the top end of achievement are similarly disproportionate.
Chapter Two: Tests Matter
1. Standardized tests do predict college performance better than any other predictor we have; grade inflation has made grades highly unreliable as a predictor.
2. Blacks and Latinos are now starting college in almost the same proportions as whites, but they are much less apt to finish. "The doors to college are open, even to those with weak academic records."
3. The Thernstrom's argue that these high dropout rates are the product of poorer academic skills. "Those students who did well on standardized reading and math tests went on to succeed in college," according to a study of white and black youths who graduated hs in the 1960s and the 1970s. "White and black students with similar high school test scores had the same college dropout rates."
4. For white and black college graduates with similar scores on math and reading skills, black college graduates actually earned 9 % more.
"If students are really being taught 'to think,' they should be able to demonstrate the quality of their thinking in a test situation." T&T
IV. Kozol, The Shame of the Nation, 2005, preface and first two chapters
A.Preface: Kozol's background and the first school he taught in back in 1964, as well as the research for his earlier book, Savage Inequalities (1991)
1. Mississippi Freedom summer and his decision to volunteer in a black freedom school in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, leading in turn to the decision to become a full-time teacher... racial isolation in Boston in 1964 (it wasn't only the south)
2. The facilities in his first school... p. 3. And over the years, a great deal of outrage that the schools are still separate and unequal, just like before brown vs. Board of Education...
3. How separate? p. 8-9
B. Chapter One.
1. Pineapple: "What's it like over there where you live? ... over there where other people live?"
2. Racial isolation and concentrated poverty... public schools that bear the name of Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall
3. A 16-year-old girl in Harlem: "If the people in New York... pp 28- 29). Compare with DuBois, Souls of Black Folk
4. Still the same psychological/emotional damage that was highlighted in testimony before the Supreme Court back in 1953 and 1954
Only in these racially isolated urban schools does he come across slogans like: "I'm smart; I know I'm smart."
C. Chapter Two: "Hitting Them Hardest When They're Small."
1. "Dear Mr. Kozol..." p. 39... one of Kozol's greatest strengths, in all his books, is documenting what's in the minds of children.
2. Disrepair and overcrowding... what does it say to students? Is it because of race? p. 43, Thomas Sobol
3. Funding discrepancies between NYC and its suburbs and even within NYC depending on race and class of the neighborhood (Instructor: Minneapolis one of those communities where urban schools spend as much per pupil as many suburban schools... is that equality? see Kozol, p. 60)
4. Early education programs in NYC for which parents pay as much as $22,000 and compete to get their children in... that's the extreme, of course, but most upper middle class parents send their children to preschools