The Problem We All Live With (The Other Story of Michael Brown)

[J842P]

Yes, because YOUR experience as an educator allows you to hold an informed opinion on this.

A good example would be Lane Tech over on the North Side, smack dab in the middle of a relatively low-income, racially diverse neighborhood. 17% of their students exceeded PSAE science standards in last year's testing. With a population of around 4100 students, that's 697 students. And Lane Tech isn't that great of a high school.

Oak Park High School, on the other hand, IS known for being a great high school. 28% of its students, or about 1600 kids, exceeded PSAE science standards last year. Compare with Proviso East, two and a half miles down the road, where 4% of its students live in homeless shelters; only 17% of its students even met PSAE standards; compare again with Proviso Math And science -- in the very same town -- where a full 10% of those students exceeded standards. There's Morton West, where only 20% of its students met standards, and then there's Morton West, then you drive down the street and over a set of train tracks and you get to Riverside Brookfield where 70% met and 20% exceeded. Drive out far enough and you get to the bizzare situation in LaGrange with its infamous (and much hated by educators and parents alike) three-tiered education program; 40% of students completely bombed the PSAEs and 30% of them exceeded it by a wide margin. And don't even get me started on Schaumburg...

What's basically happening is we have multiple populations of students who are living VERY close to each other, usually in the same neighborhoods, but are being segregated by ability level. The students who are being concentrated into poor schools CONTINUE to perform poorly while students directed into more advanced programs continue to improve. You thus have situations where students live ACROSS THE STREET from one another and are receiving a vastly different quality of education.

And what it comes down to is funding. It is no secret and has never been a secret that Proviso East High School is one of the worst funded public schools in Illinois. It is hardly the largest, it is far from the most under-performing. But it exists in a township that is reluctant to "throw money away" at an underperforming school and instead spent around $30 million dollars in economic support for a series of exclusive private schools. A few years ago, the locals raised a big stink about the public schools being short-changed, students using books that have been out of print since the Cold War ended, math classes where students had to share calculators and teachers who had to drive to Target and buy sidewalk chalk because the district couldn't afford to give them any. The government finally caved to these complaints... by creating Proviso Math and Science Academy and collecting the top students from East and West into that instead. And everyone who complained shut up for a few years... and East is still using textbooks from 1994.

You would be very lucky to have 20.

In a school with a couple of hundred students, sure. Even Englewood Tech -- notable for being one of the worst performing schools in America -- still managed to place a half dozen of its students into college prep programs as seniors.

But high school is 4 years and AP classes are normally senior year classes

I suppose that's why me and my sister both took AP classes from Freshman through Senior year.

But yeah, please continue, I'm sure you totally know what you're talking about.

I asked ron this, and I'll ask you too:
Why did black people go through all that trouble to desegregate schools in the 1960s?

I think we have a difference of opinion on what an AP class is.

When I was in school AP classes allowed you to take a test at the end and if you scored high enough that counted as having passed the first semester college class in the subject matter. I think it also counted as transfer credits in the field in question.

These are obviously the top level class the high school offers in the subject matter and thus pretty much only available to seniors.

Are you confusing this with simply accelerated classes that can be offered at any level? And generally are if they have enough students who want it.

At my high school a few AP classes were offered to sophomores and the rest were for juniors and seniors.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Eliminating poverty would in turn eliminate about 60% of the problems in the schools. It would help our crime problems and our drug problems, especially if we started treating drug addiction as an illness and not as a moral failure that deserves punishment.

To be fair, most of us are assuming that "convince American political leaders to actually focus their resources on eliminating poverty" is an exercise in futility. That is INEED the root of the problem.

We take it for granted because it's not all that helpful to know when it comes to solving the problem. It's sort of like how soldiers on the battlefield don't spend a whole lot of time lamenting the naive expectations of their leaders or the self-serving political machinations of their own statesmen and instead narrow their focus on "How the FUCK are we supposed to get across that street without getting shot?!"

The inability to deal with these problems politically out of the schools stems from one and only one source, that in the last forty years or so, we have been listening to conservatives as if they were capable of making any sense at all, instead of doing what we have always done in the more successful periods of our governance, that is to ignore them because they will always be systemically wrong about the problems that we are having in society at any point in time.

But they just sound so confident! How could you not agree with them? [/conservative]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think we have a difference of opinion on what an AP class is.

When I was in school AP classes allowed you to take a test at the end and if you scored high enough that counted as having passed the first semester college class in the subject matter. I think it also counted as transfer credits in the field in question.

These are obviously the top level class the high school offers in the subject matter and thus pretty much only available to seniors.

Are you confusing this with simply accelerated classes that can be offered at any level? And generally are if they have enough students who want it.

At my high school a few AP classes were offered to sophomores and the rest were for juniors and seniors.

Were these classes that offered the chance of college credit??

 

[ronburgundy]

I asked this question before and you never did answer:
Why did black people push for integration in the 50s?

Because unlike today, in the 50's there were massive funding disparities in favor of whites. Unlike today, there were no laws mandating equal per pupil spending at the district level, or State and Fed programs that give minority schools extra funds resulting in greater total funding for non-white schools than white schools.
A fact about CPS schools shown in the report I linked and quoted, which you predictably ignored.

 

[J842P]

At my high school a few AP classes were offered to sophomores and the rest were for juniors and seniors.

Were these classes that offered the chance of college credit??

Yes. Technically, it is not the classes themselves that offer the chance of college credit but the AP Test which the classes are designed to prepare the student for. However, one can take an AP exam without taking an AP test.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I asked this question before and you never did answer:
Why did black people push for integration in the 50s?

Because unlike today, in the 50's there were massive funding disparities in favor of whites. Unlike today, there were no laws mandating equal per pupil spending at the district level, or State and Fed programs that give minority schools extra funds resulting in greater total funding for non-white schools than white schools.

Which doesn't explain why they were pushing for INTEGRATION of schools. "Separate but equal" was the goal of segregation at the time; it was a foregone conclusion then, and remains so now, that segregation cannot provide equal education or equal opportunity for students no matter how you present the funding/resources situation.

It came down to the issue of quality of education. White schools had more and better trained teachers, better facilities, better resources, stronger and more organized curriculums. Disparity of funding was a part of it, but eliminating that disparity was NOT seen as a viable solution in and of itself, which is why that solution was rejected.

More than that, the Supreme Court's decision in "Brown v the Board of Education" echoes the research I linked to earlier, namely that when a group of people are institutionally separated from the general population and given an implicit expectation of inferiority, the quality of their education will inevitably suffer:

Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does. ...

"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system." ...

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Which is why I asked the question of LP and why I asked you. Black students actually perform better at racially diverse schools than they do at all-black schools. The leaders of the civil rights movement knew this as early as the 1940s; we've known it ever since, and it remains true today. It isn't merely about the quality of education at those schools (which IS inferior for various reasons) nor about the equality of facilities and faculty (which is again inferior for various reasons). Even if the quality of those schools was exactly equal by some quantitative measure, the systematic exclusion of students from more competitive programs they would otherwise have access to but for growing up in the wrong neighborhood creates a very real barrier to social, educational and eventually economic mobility. It was for this very reason that segregation of schools was originally banned.

I don't suppose you noticed the significance of the thread title?

"Accidental" segregation -- that is, segregation by economic class or by neighborhood instead of by racial fiat -- has the same negative effect on students. It isn't QUITE as damaging as it could be, and it is a much easier problem to solve because countermeasures to it are rarely met with massive resistance by white supremacists. But it's the same basic problem now as it was in the 1950s, and it has the same basic solution. The more you integrate those schools, the more opportunities you give to students to grow beyond whatever meager start they've had in life.

If, on the other hand, you do not think those students are deserving of those opportunities, alot of people -- especially those inner city types who supposedly don't care about their children -- are going to want to know why.

 

[arkirk]

In the end it is the process of winnowing out all but a few studennts somebody thinks are more deserving for special educational treatment. In my first year in High School, I took an AP course in Biology..that was the ninth grade> I was fifteen and the year was 1957. It was in Glendale, California, an ALL WHITE CALIFORNIA TOWN. We tend to think that because our state and city are thought of as liberal, that they always were liberal. I was taught in that Biology class that we would live to see a great conflict between inferior people and people like ourselves. The teacher told us that the educated bright people would win in any such conflict due to their developing superior weapons. I got a B in the course, but I still remember some of those lectures and realize that I have always carried this difference...all my life. Friggin racism in a school course. We have lived with this all our lives in one form or another. What Athena says that economic class or racial segregation has the SAME NEGATIVE EFFECT. She is right.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Now sitting next to white kids doesn't make you smarter, but it does put you in schools with the better teachers, greater resources, and more rigorous classes.

It also encourages black and white kids working together and being friends, playing on the same teams, etc, which discourages racist attitudes on both sides. I think it is the best tool for fighting racism that you have.