Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'd like to see research on different home cultures. I'd especially like to see a way to assign a metric to a family to rate how "scholarly" the environment is for the children.
You couldn't ask people directly, because pretty much every parent will agree with the statement: "We think education is important." It's just that a lot of them don't translate that into action. E.g. "What, why would you read to a 1 year old? They can't understand it."
Instead, go to substantive things like:
1) How often did you read to your child at age 0-3 months
2) When did your child first start watching TV?
3) Do you have books or magazines in the house?
4) Do you read with your kids every day?
...
The problem I have with a lot of these studies and various parenting advice is that tiny, tiny details matter.
Word choice, what you remark on, what you reward, and how you behave by default (as opposed to when consciously teaching) matter so much.
Investigations into child psychology should probably teach us a lot about the children, themselves.
The problem with investigating parenting is that you really need a 24/7 video log.
Reading does help, but it has to done in the correct way, like much else to do with education in general.
The Success For All study done in 2006:
"Conclusion The quantity and quality of research on Success for All, and the positive outcomes found in almost all studies by more than fi fty investigators in eighteen different research institutions worldwide, clearly establish that Success for All is highly effective in increasing student reading. The effects can be quite substantial, averaging more than half of the national white-minority achievement gap and almost a full grade equivalent by second grade (see Slavin et al., 2006). In a time when educators are increasingly being asked to use proven programs, Success for All is the best demonstration in existence of the idea that rigorous research on practical programs can be done and can show substantial positive effects. Every child should have a right to participate in a program with this level of evidence."
While I agree with the idea of picking specific metrics and asking about them, at a cultural level I think what is going on here is a little more complicated than simply not knowing.
Frequently public schools teach things that the subcultures feel are simply not relevant, to their lives. Let me give you an example:
When I showed up for day 1 of high school, I was immediately bombarded with the idea of applying to college. I was essentially told that the next four years would be spent preparing for college - that's what the "point" of hs was. This in an of itself is pretty bad, in terms of limiting intellectual exploration and all that good stuff.
But imagine you aren't planning to go to college. Imagine no one in your family went to college, and it's likely you'll end up working a blue collar job where your degree doesn't matter. What exactly should your parents be doing/saying here to get their kid interested in school? And why even bother?
TLDR: I think this is much more about subcultural groups feeling excluded from, and thus rejecting, mainstream education, and the cultural norms that are projected from it, than simply explaining the cultural norms more scientifically.
African-American culture did not just happen on its own, you know. There were major societal factors that forced that group of people to have a culture that is the way it is.
It's very important to make the culture vs. race point because culture changes over time, as you've pointed out.
Also, I like to focus on culture because it's crazy that people get ultra-detailed in their discussion of race, while often ignoring this thing that is much more causative, in my experience.
How many farmers do you know and where?
I'm serious. Commercial farming in the US is quite high-tech and successful farming has always been reasonably intellectual.
Is there any documented benefit to this? I'll be a father in about 3.5 months so I still have a little time to prepare :)
Kids imitate what you do, so I wasn't thinking about it in the context of a learning program, but rather being part of a house where everyone reads all the time.
It's useful to know if it's the kind of place where reading to the child would take extra effort, or where not reading to the child would take extra effort.
Maybe I'm focusing on the literal words in your post too much and you're meaning it in a broader sense, more as in how much exposure to books the children get and how much they see their parents read. I guess from that point of view I can understand and agree.
(an interesting tidbit I remember, it may be from the Freakonomics book or blog, is a study that showed that children in households with many books did better at school; so some city council thought it wise to give all new mothers a few shelves worth of books, in an attempt to boost performance of all children in the city. This turned out (iirc) to have no effect at all, which is rather obvious to me, as you may have the book in the house, but you still need to read them).
Which is exactly your point I guess ;)
Yes, that's right.
"Reading" to our infant consisted of her lolling in our laps and attempting to lick the board-book pages, while we maybe got to read a page or two. Later on, she'd bat at the pages, trying to imitate our page-turning. The only difference between a book and a chew-toy was that we'd compliment her on reading and point out when we were reading too.
If you don't think you'd want to make a big deal about reading to your child, then don't fake it. It sounds like she won't lack for opportunity or encouragement in your household.
P.S. The best parenting advice I ever got was to ignore parenting advice I don't agree with, but to respond to all parenting advice with "Thanks, we'll try that". People want to help, it's just that they're often wrong (for you and your child).
UPDATE> On a tangent: it's amazing how significant what we choose to remark on is for little kids. We would point out colours of shapes, and praise our daughter when she got the colour right. Now colours are extremely significant. I.e. every object must be described as (colour, name). I wonder what the result would have been if we'd started with some other property.
She also has to have us roll up her pants when wearing boots, because once we mentioned that she should roll up her pants so she wouldn't trip. Now it's dogma -- roll up pants or else meltdown. It's neat to see her little world-model forming: you don't trip because of a physical obstruction to your toe. No, you trip because your pants aren't rolled up.
"Factors that are important in determining high standardized test scores in children include: highly educated parents, high socioeconomic status, maternal age of greater than thirty when the child was born, low birth weight, English as the primary language spoken in the home, parental involvement in the PTA, and many books in the home environment. Also, adopted children tended to have lower standardized test scores than their non-adopted peers. Factors that are not important in determining high standardized test scores in children include: the family is intact, the parents recently moved to a better neighborhood, the mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten, the child attended Head Start (US government program providing education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families), the parents regularly take the child to museums, the child is regularly spanked, the child frequently watches television, the parents read to the child nearly every day. Noting the overgeneralization, Levitt explains that what is important in parenting is who you are, not what you do."
http://www.wikisummaries.org/Freakonomics:_A_Rogue_Economist...
It was a surprise to me that not all fathers read math books for enjoyment in their spare time.
It was a surprise to me that people study things they're not interested in.
I've noted elsewhere in this thread the difference between doing things "because it'll be good for the kids", and doing things that are good for the kids because it's what you do every day.
So it could be that parents who do these enrichment activities but don't "live it" are dragging the average down.
I'm not sure how you'd test for "preach it" vs. "live it", though.
"In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008."
Isn't that exactly how many you would expect based on the demographics of the US?
Is 5% actual vs 7% desired a big enough gap to cause alarm? I don't know.
And let's say, of that 13%, half are men and half are women. So, it would be "normal" if 6.5% of college students are black men.
5% vs 6.5% doesn't seem like a HUGE problem.
Data source: http://www.factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DTTable?_bm=y&-...
edit 1: A strong, telling corollary is that forced immigrant groups always fare poorer than willful immigrant groups. Always.
edit 2: How many generations removed from communist tyranny are America's Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants? How're they doing?
Black America has come vey far, and is one of the most dominant cultural forces on the planet. That's for the peak of the society. The bottom of the society still has to deal with a lot of legacy problems, and attitudes like yours don't help the problem.
I doubt that the majority of problems comes from a sense of entitlement, like you strangely enough, seem to believe.
What? I'm not making value judgments.
This is absurdly simple. If people have reason to believe that their efforts will be in vain, then they make no effort. But it's worse than that with socio-economic groups. Some members come to rely on the group's official explanation for lack of success, in order to maintain self-dignity. Those members hold back the others in their group to the best of their ability, else the official defense of mediocrity be disproven.
A great example is the Irish Catholics in America. "No Irish Need Apply" signs? Never happened (in America). http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/no-irish.htm The myth of The Other keeping them down was necessary for them as a group. Even up through the first half of the 20th century, they insisted they were being held down as the explanation for their much lower income levels relative to white Protestants. Then came 1960. JFK was elected. If one of your group can get elected president, there's no more need for excuses. Since 1960, Irish Catholics have grown more and more like white Protestants. Both have almost the exact same income distribution now. Catholic church attendance has plummeted since 1960, asymptotically approaching Protestant church attendance. The group stopped reaching for excuses, and things got better for them. Fast.
Seriously, in 1990, you don't think there were any black musicians on MTV? That seems well at odds with my memory.
I have to say family plays the biggest role in education. My mom forced me to learn the 9x9 multiplication tables in grade 1. By the time we actually reached multiplication tables in grade 2, I was already able to find the areas of simple shapes like circles and trapezoids.
But after grade 4, I didn't receive any extra math education, and had the same education as all my peers. Never had a tutor, and I continued to get 90s in my math courses all through high school.
You mentioned the idea of: "What's the point in trying? They won't let us succeed." And I do hear that a lot from my black peers in high school. If you say anything that can be mildly interpreted as racist, then you're in big trouble. Like "don't walk in dark alleys at night" trouble. There are outliers of course. Our valedictorian was black, and he had the second highest grades in the graduating class. (top grades belonged to chinese kid. I'd have to say that 8/10 of the top students were asian)
I wouldn't say that the "communist tyranny" had anything to do with our academic performance. I'd definitely have to say that asian culture is far more competitive than other groups. Either you get high marks, or get yelled at by your parents.
But ... the culture of victimization is a terrible thing. You have to somehow pretend the injustices didn't happen, while working on the aftermath of the injustices.