http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/rich-black-flunking/Content?oid=1070459&showFullText=true Please be very respectful in your responses, I just thought the article was interesting.
I actually taught at a wealthy, primarily black high school after college. I have my own theories. The summary is that their parents baby them like crazy. Might be more of a private high school thing though. But from athletics to academics, the parents would come in there and argue why their child is special. HUGE amount of entitlement. Other teachers complained about it too.
Without having read the article, I think you could eliminate the "primarily black" part of the quote and still be entirely accurate. At least, that is my experience at the colleges I have been at. The wealthy parents think their kids could never do any of the awful crap they have done, while the less privledged parents you have to talk them out of coming down to campus to slap their kids up side the head and making them withdraw.
pretty much agree with the conclusion. lots of victim mentality in the black culture still and it leads to an entitlement mentality that is only fostered further. Disagree with this though:
In my experience, white parents kind of neglect their kids and let them run loose. They are not very involved in their kids lives and kind of have a loose leash on them versus other ethnicities.
I heard an interview on the radio a couple of weeks ago. I didn't hear all of it, but I think it was Art Robinson being interviewed. He noted the achievement gap for minorities is substantial in public schools and the dropout rates even worse. What I found interesting, though, is that he said that home-schooled and minority students in private schools performed nearly identically to white students. That would seem to leave the turd in the pockets of the teachers. I seldom hear, however, why it is that asian minority groups do so well in school, compared to everyone else. Go Blazers
If a parent, regardless of race, puts forth the effort to research and apply to private school or to teach their kids at home, that points to the fact that they at least care somewhat about their child's education. I think that parent involvement is a bigger reason why in that study minorities performed at a similar level to their white classmates at private school than the fact that the school itself was private (and all that it brings; teachers, facilities,etc). As for Asian's doing well in school, stereotypically Asian parents stress school over everything else. When education is a top priority from the day you are born, you're going to be more likely to succeed. Like all stereotypes, it isn't always the case. My grandparents (Chinese immigrants) didn't stress school all that much to my mom and her brothers and sisters. She had to work in the family restaurant from high school on. While she went on to college and everything, its not like she performed extremely well in school nor did she take math/science/etc beyond the graduation requirements. My fiancee on the other hand knew how to identify shapes before she could speak and reading well before the typical child. This is because education was stressed by her mother from day 1. She ended up at one of the top private schools in Seattle and got a JD/MBA from an ivy league school. Both of those things may not have happened if education wasn't important to her parents.
I saw a TED lecture on this. That kids were asked to do some tests, and when asian kids were told their parents knew about this, their results differed. I forget what white kids were primarily influenced by, but I thought it was funny. I can't find the lecture though
Kids at a private school have parents paying extra. Those parents want their kids to do well. You can bet the parents are cracking the whip on the kids. The article i linked in the OP mentions "immigrants by choice" vs "forced immigrants".
Stupid is as stupid does. A teacher cannot teach any student, but any student can learn from a teacher.
Well, shoot, I just wrote the most eloquent response that would've progressed our country more than 100 years into the future but then I accidentally hit ctrl+r rather than ctrl+t. Anyway, the gist of it was that we weren't passing on information adequately enough. Instead of treating education as information, we were storing them as listless data and then presenting them in the form of educational texts. This is, then, why funding for poor public schools has yielded little to no results. Too much data, no information on how to access it or the mechanics of life in general. Furthermore, too many teachers had agendas to be able to tell an 'honest story'. The problem, I felt, with sociology and ethnic studies (which, essentially, have good intentions) is that too many people forget it is supposed to be based on the concept of causation not equating to correlation. As a result, experts in the field set up studies hoping to cripple an entire structural framework but because sociology and ethnic studies isn't based on factual evidence, the studies serve little to no purpose. I also cited the criticism of Ralph Ellison's existential novel, The Invisible Man, as being a prime example of how ideals within the black community support elitist figureheads instead (Rev. Jesse Jackson, for example). The criticism from black critics, at the time, was that the novel didn't perpetrate or emphasize racial equality/injustice but instead focused on a wanderer who drifted from place to place. What critics wanted was a novel that propagandized their beliefs rather than one that portrayed the state of a conflicted individual. Tying into the novel, I targeted the church (and mass religion) for breeding this kind of arrogant group mentality. I concluded that this group mentality thinking, then, led to a chunk of culturally self-entitled/materialistic information being passed down from generation to generation within the black community. This is, then, why all the negative stereotypes of blacks seemed focused on self-entitlement and materialism rather than education/individuality/independence. It also doesn't help that the racially prejudice behaviors of our ancestors pushed blacks into a lower class struggling for information and identity either.
Would you then conclude that different ethnicities respond better or worse to different stimuli's? What I mean, it that maybe Asians respond better to the blackboard and rote method while Blacks respond better to a more global approach where the devil isn't in the details necessarily, but more of a 'the frame is more important than the balckboard' theory?
Another interesting study on the subject: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/education/09gap.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general Pretty depressing stuff. I think a lot of it is parenting and culture. There are just far more single moms among African Americans. It's not easy raising kids, and I pity anybody who tries to do it on their own. I also think there aren't nearly enough role models for black kids. Nearly all successful black people portrayed in the media are singers or athletes. That's why I never bought that Obama's race wasn't really that big of a deal. If you have no faith in government programs but still want to inspire black kids to achieve in academics, he's a fantastic role model for what any American can accomplish.
