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Comment by jhspaybar | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me there's a giant elephant in the room that no one wants to speak about. There is something broken with our educational system, specifically related to blacks. If you look at the top 10 states, they are not racially diverse consisting of large white populations. If you go from the bottom up, you pretty much have locales ranked in their density of black population. THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM. Until someone can stand up and say there is a problem culturally in black populations that needs fixing, or can determine what our school systems are doing wrong specifically to harm our black population our country will continue to suffer the consequences. This is not an easy subject to address, but it needs to be approached head on. We have a problem and it needs to be acknowledged before it can be fixed.

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I'm confident in saying it's a cultural issue. Probably more to do with "poor" than "black".

Anecdotally I know this to be true. I live near a major urban high school in Denver. It's an interesting school as the surrounding neighborhoods have been undergoing rapid gentrification. The student population is half upper-middle class and the other half traditionally poor. It's pretty easy to pick out which group is which based on clothing, habits, and (sadly) ethnicity.

On any given day you'll see dozens and dozens of kids from the poorer demographics skipping class and getting into trouble. The bus into Downtown is filled with these kids literally blowing-off their education.

Talking to teachers at the school reveals what you'd expect. The cultural bias against education among the poorer students means most of those students do really poorly. The kids from more wealthy backgrounds take the same classes, with the same teachers, and use the same curriculum. They actually tend to do quite well.

Point being: I don't think the education system is broken at all. I think we have MAJOR cultural issues at play that heavily bias certain demographics from achieving in school.

I have absolutely no idea how you fix that.

Completely agree. Rich black kids would have no problems; poor white kids are just as badly prepared as poor black kids; the common denominator is economic resources more than anything. Being rich affords the child several benefits: 1. Stay at home parent with the time to take the child to enrichment classes, help the child with homework, challenge the child to stay on top of his classes 2. Child has access to extracurricular experiences such as summer science camps, weekend scouting trips, leadership retreats, etc. 3. Parents are involved and interested in the child's activities - parents of challenged backgrounds work so hard to make ends meet that at the end of the day, they just crash in front of the TV and tell the kids to play outside.

We have a problem in poor communities. Black communities are disproportionately poor due to historical factors. The problem isn't that we tap-dance around the issue, the problem is we don't like the solutions.

What are the solutions?

Investment in poor communities.

That seems..vague. What are we investing in? More money for schools? More money for roads? Mor money for...? Is there data to suggest that it works?

They tried that in Detroit...

Yes, and certain people in Detroit didn't like the solution, so they bolted and the whole city collapsed. They didn't seem to like the solution.

I second the other commenter. What are you advocating specifically that we don't like? Throwing money at poor black (and white) communities such that the individuals can live without having to work, or bringing back slavery (for poor whites and blacks) with a twist of being enforced as a contract between slave and master? Something else?

The problem is that we are more concerned with political correctness than solutions, and it's not PC to associate economical and educational problems with race and ethnicity.

It's not PC to do so in an extremely crude fashion that does nothing to illuminate problems nor suggest ways forward.

Among my friends in education, it's commonly accepted that the problems at underperforming schools are largely social issues and not education issues. The real question is why the public, politicians, and media don't focus on the social side more?

Because you can't just throw money at social issues.

culturally

Ha ha. Courageous giant elephant-identifier, you are. "Culture" is actually the unavoidable conventional wisdom. Whence the culture? is the real question.

The #10 state is Virginia, which is 20% African American (compared to California's 6.2%). I'd say that poverty is the more probable root cause.

Your hypothesis is that California ranks poorly on science because they have more blacks than other states.

Virginia is ranked #10 and has 40% proficient in science.

California is ranked #47 and has 22% proficient in science.

Virginia has 19.4% black population. (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/51000.html)

California has 6.2% black population. (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html)

Since Virginia has almost twice the rate of science proficiency as California does, and Virginia also has three times as many blacks by percentage of population as California, it would seem that the hypothesis that California ranks poorly on science because they have more blacks than other states is not correct.

Thanks for these statistics, I think the issue is pretty clearly "urban" as even the article points out. As other commenters have said it has more to do with poverty than race, it's just that blacks are generally heavily concentrated in poor communities. It may have nothing to do with race outside of the correlation of race to income levels in many communities, but the fact remains we are failing our black populations.

On the other hand, California has about 1.5 times as many total blacks as Virginia. One might wonder whether there's a critical threshold X that is independent of the population proportion. Basically, I don't think these figures are sufficient to conclude either way.

Until someone can stand up and say there is a problem culturally in black populations that needs fixing

People have stood up and said there is a cultural black problem. Off the top of my head, I know that Bill Cosby called out black men a couple of years ago and was absolutely lambasted by the black community. Aaron McGruder, the guy behind the Boondocks is another who comes to mind who calls out the black community and is often

I invite you to watch this illuminating interview with the creator of The Wire: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qulcqNMHVic

I think the problem with California has to do more with the large Latino immigrant population than blacks. It's hard to teach science when language is a barrier.

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