Soloist wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2024 3:34 pm
Ken do you see black children from well off families having academic problems?
Sometimes but not always. And "problems" isn't the right word. Mostly they are just fine but perhaps not performing at the level that they might be had they been raised by "tiger mom" Asian parents. For example, it is perfectly common at my daughter's school (where I sometimes teach) to see Asian-American students taking 15+ different AP classes along with endless test prep and tutoring. There is some of that same pressure among wealthy White parents but it is definitely much less intense. My own daughters will have finished HS having taken 4, 8 and 9 AP classes respectively. You don't see nearly as many Black kids in those classes, even if they are from well-off families and doing just fine in school. It is hard for me to pin down exactly why. Although some of it is certainly peer pressure.
I have few Black students here in the Vancouver area but I had a lot back in Texas. Where I had Black students who were children of doctors, professors, college coaches (Baylor) and even retired NFL stars. And even they seemed to struggle with getting sucked into friend groups or extended family who were not necessarily the best influences. When I had Black athletes who were talented enough to have multiple D1 football offers (and I would have on average about 5 of those kids per year). I would always advise them to get out of Texas and go to the best school they could get an offer from. UCLA, Georgia Tech, Michigan, etc. Texas will still be here when they graduate. But it is good to go off and make your own way rather than staying local where all your local posse of friends will suck you back in. And where everyone will want something from you. Of course everyone else in their lives was telling them the opposite. To stay home and play at Baylor, A&M, UT, TCU, SMU, TSU, etc. But a couple did take my advice and did well.
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A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
Soloist wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2024 3:58 pm
Would you say those well-off black families prioritized family over academics?
No, I think it is something a bit different. I think it is more cultural. I'm sure there has been endless volumes written about this topic. But even if you have Black families who are hyper-achievement oriented when it comes to academics. Their kids are swimming in a larger culture where academics isn't so much valued. It is flashy millionaire athletes, pop stars, rappers, etc. And a lot of the messaging from that world is actually opposite of academic performance. All the college athletes who spend more time promoting their NIL deals online rather than studying, and for whom the objective is "one and done" and off to the NBA/NFL rather than staying in school to graduate. All the rappers and artists who glorify the gangster-ish life over academic achievement. And the fact that if you you are a Black kid from a wealthy family your wider circle of Black friends and family are not as likely to be as affluent and academic oriented. Whereas if you are a White or Asian kid from an affluent family it is much more likely that your entire circle of friends and family will be exactly the same.
Anyway, that is just my take. I have known affluent or upper-middle class Black parents who struggle with this mightily without good answers. It is tough for every parent but they frankly have it tougher. Honestly, many of the most supportive and involved parents I have ever had anywhere were professional Black parents back in Texas. It's not for lack of trying.
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A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
Ken wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2024 3:29 pmIf you look at the performance of White and Asian students in the US they outperform their counterparts in every European country and all but a very few Asian countries. And Asian-American students outperform everyone else on earth. There is a reason why wealthy Asian parents from places like Korea, China, and India bring their children to the US to be educated.
The real problem with American public education is figuring out how to bring Black and to a lesser extent Hispanic students up to the level that White and Asian students are already at. And that is an enormously complex problem involving economics, poverty, inequity, racism, social mores, culture, and an endless list of other complexities that make simplistic solutions impossible.
Are you sure about that? What if we just compare Asian countries (perhaps Korea, Japan, and China) and European countries (perhaps Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, France) to some African countries. Are the same differences still present?
Yes I am sure of that. I'm not talking about African countries but Black Americans. The only international comparison of student performance is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA Test) https://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/ run by the OECD and given in dozens of countries around the world. Country-specific scores are almost never aggregated by race so we usually just see how the US compares to Germany, Korea, or Finland in the aggregate. However when you disaggregate the most recent 2022 US scores by race and ethnicity, this is what you get. In reading, US Asians are off-the-charts better than anyone else in the world. And US white students are second only to Singapore and well ahead of Japan and Korea and every country in Europe. And frankly even US Black students don't do that badly on an international level. They outperform many European countries and are tied with the Netherlands.
When you look at math the picture is this. US Asians are slightly behind Singapore and Taiwan but ahead of the rest of the world and US White students are ahead of every European country but Estonia and Switzerland.
If you look at Science, US Asians are again at the very top of the pack and US White students are behind only Singapore, Macao, and Japan and well ahead of all of Europe.
It would be interesting to know where students from CM schools rank but they don't participate in the PISA test as far as I know.
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A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
Josh wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2024 5:04 pm
That list has a distinct lack of entries from the continent of Africa.
Yes, it is a voluntary program and only Morocco is participating from the continent of Africa. As for why that is, you'll have to do your own research. I suspect public education in most of Africa isn't up to western standards outside of a few places like South Africa.
But that is completely irrelevant to the point I am making. Which is that White and Asian-American students perform near or at the very top of the list when compared to all other countries around the world. Black and Hispanic American students are lagging behind their White and Asian-American counterparts but actually aren't performing all that badly either.
Of course my larger point is that if you are going to compare public and private school performance in any kind of apples to apples comparison then you have to disaggregate for things like race, ethnicity, and seriocomic status so that you are actually comparing SCHOOLs and not other factors like rates of poverty or larger socioeconomic conditions.
These are the countries that are participating in PISA. It is a pretty comprehensive list and includes every peer country against which the US might want to compare itself in terms of public education.
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A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
Ken, I know that you and I sometimes severely disagree on various things, but I just want to commend you for your honesty and perception into this difficult question. It is not only difficult to understand, but it is also difficult to speak so clearly and honestly about it (due mostly to cultural issues of which I am confident you are fully aware).
Im a first year teacher teaching 8th grade here is a non-exhaustive list of things I've had to teach that I feel like the kids should already know when they're in 8th grade.
How to round
Number places (ones, tenths etc...)
The industrial revolution
How to spell Telescope
How Time zones work
"Google" is not an acceptable citation.
How to find the volume of a cube
That pollution didn't start 10 years ago
The prefix oct- means 8
That there is no air in space
They are so behind and there will be a reckoning in a few years when industry begins to suffer because we won't have a skilled work force and it will get blamed on teachers even though parents and admin keep pushing kids through who have no skills.
I was eating lunch the other day at burger joint and there were a couple kids sitting behind me who looked like maybe Junior or Seniors in HS.
They were working on basic multiplication and were laughing at how hard it was. Just calling each other stupid and having a jolly old time knowing they were going to fail tomorrow’s test, calling it “way too hard” and “pointless”.
These are older teenagers about to enter the work force and they were just trying to work through 1st and 2nd grade math. Honestly it stunned me. I understand people have development issues, but it was the fact they found their lack of math skills HILARIOUS. Absolutely baffles me. At their age I had so many hopes and dreams about what I could be in life. I feel like they had already given up and they weren’t even done with HS. So depressing.
This does not surprise one bit. Back 10-15 years ago, in my evangelical church, I had near high school graduates that could not read an NIV Bible. One city public school graduate that could not multiply, at all. Parents that were simply were not there, children lived with Grandma, who was semi-literate herself. I could throw up city public school reports, there are whole schools that do not have a single student passing the state math test. That test is difficult, but I am quite certain that my Mennonite school educated 7th graders could pass it with some stress, but they could surely pass it. Oh, yes, for science I need lend them calculators. They are not permitted to use these for math. They can for science, since I make the rules for that. I was half tempted to gift them a set of slide rules, but apparently the cheap ones are not made any more.
My oldest daughter teaches in an ESOL program. Completely different set of students, mostly legal immigrants. You bet they have the homework done, and when the student is absent, she knows in advance. These students will eventually pick up the English, and be successful. Two parent homes, parents do not let their children roam the streets at 2 AM.
SO if you have a church school nearby, I would suggest you strongly
Neto wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2024 5:18 pm
Ken, I know that you and I sometimes severely disagree on various things, but I just want to commend you for your honesty and perception into this difficult question. It is not only difficult to understand, but it is also difficult to speak so clearly and honestly about it (due mostly to cultural issues of which I am confident you are fully aware).
Thanks.
In the 16 years I've been working in public schools, without a doubt the most supportive and involved parents I have had were professional and upper middle class Black parents back in Texas. They would show up to fall open house dressed professionally and give me their business cards with hand-written notes on the back begging me to keep them in the loop and to let them know about any issues and give them the chance to address them first before bouncing them off to detention or remedial classes or in-school suspension or whatever. They would all compare notes and they knew which teachers were supportive and which were likely to bounce their kids off to detention or in-school suspension for trivial things and get their kids caught up in the "system."
By contrast, most White parents would shuffle through open house bored, watching their watches or phones just because it was something they were "supposed" to do. There were exceptions. But those are generalizations that held true in my experience. And the notion that their children might be treated unfairly by the school system and that it is something tricky to navigate is the furthest thing from most White parent's minds.
This country is still two different worlds in many ways. Even when we occupy the same spaces.
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A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
I've been a teacher in conservative Mennonite schools for nearly 20 years. (I also attended public schools from grades 1 through 6.) I've mostly taught students in grades 7–12, in four different communities. I'm afraid that in some ways there are fewer differences between our schools and public schools than we would care to admit. I don't mean to be negative, but I think it's important to be honest and realistic about the problems we face, avoiding complacency and pride ("I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as other men are").
Many of the issues mentioned in the first few posts in this thread are all too familiar to me. I've taught 8th graders how to sound out words. I once had to teach a high school senior how to divide properly. Many students fail to follow basic directions. Many simply don't do their homework. I've had students who don't know things like whether the Civil War or World War II came first, or that meat is animal muscle. It's not unusual to receive writing assignments with depressingly erratic grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and no paragraph divisions. Excessive absences have consistently been a headache. Many students will put forth a surprising amount of effort to avoid having to think. I could go on.
Nor are the social ills often associated with public schools and their problems absent from our schools and communities. I'm pretty sure I've always had at least one student being raised by a single parent. I've seen the effects of abuse, family dysfunction, and illegal drug use—just about everything you can think of except for homelessness and similar levels of poverty, which I don't think I've seen any of my students deal with. I'm on the planning committee for a large annual gathering of conservative Anabaptist teachers (Teachers Week at Faith Builders), and helping students who have experienced trauma is consistently one of the most in-demand topics for breakout sessions and workshops. These issues probably exist at lower rates among Mennonite students (as far as I know I've only had a single student that used illegal drugs, for example), but they are definitely present.
Some of these problems exist simply because learning is a complex, challenging undertaking for many students. Some find academic work extraordinarily difficult. Some are just lazy. As others have mentioned, parents' attitudes and involvement have a major impact. Education is a low priority for many Mennonite parents. I've often dealt with parents who have very lackadaisical approaches to their children's homework, or see little point in learning that has no obvious occupational or economic benefit. Mennonites often value their schools as community centers rather than as educational institutions. (I hasten to add that I've worked with many other parents who are deeply concerned that their children reach their academic potential, and work very hard to help their children excel.)
Our schools do have significant strengths. We have the opportunity to educate in the context of our beliefs and values. I think the schools I've taught in have been generally successful in fostering supportive, harmonious atmospheres. I've seen very few instances of bullying, and I don't think I've ever had to break up a physical fight.
A few years ago I heard about an effort to compile standardized test scores from Mennonite schools that could potentially be used to make comparisons with other schools, but I don't know what came of that. From what I recall of my own students' standardized test scores, they tend to fall in the percentile rankings I would expect based on their abilities. Other than that I have no hard data, so take the following for whatever it's worth. I suspect that our conservative Anabaptist schools, academically, provide a higher floor but reach a lower ceiling when compared with public schools. My hypothesis is that they avoid the very worst outcomes due largely to lower rates of poverty and higher rates of two-parent families, and do not reach the highest levels of achievement due largely to the lack of resources given toward helping the most capable students reach their full potential.
