Black boys' culture works against school, study says

A rare public recognition that blacks are different

The achievement gap separating black boys from just about everyone else springs from a powerful, anti-education culture rising in the black community, a local black think tank argues in a new report. Parents who undervalue education, and a mass media that peppers youth with the quick, shallow rewards of hip-hop lifestyle, are steering alarming numbers of boys down a dead-end path, PolicyBridge contends.

The report calls for public recognition of a phenomenon crippling the black community and the civic will to fight it. It's to be released today via mailings to civic leaders and on the group's Web site, www.policy-bridge.org. "In our community, family culture has changed, and street culture has changed," said Randell McShepard, 42, an executive at RPM International and the secretary of PolicyBridge. "But the headline now is, Those changes are dragging down the education system.' "

McShepard, Timothy Goler and Mark Batson, all local black professionals who attended Cleveland and East Cleveland public schools, founded the nonprofit research center in 2004 to explore issues critical to the black community. They wrote the report with guidance from university researchers and public policy makers, as well as from teachers, principals and Cleveland school students, who are liberally quoted.

Some education experts are skeptical about the report's broad conclusions, but they said the topic is critical to Cleveland. "The Rap on Culture: How Anti-Education Messages in Media, at Home, and on the Streets Hold Back African American Youth" starts from a well-known premise. Black youths, and black boys in particular, perform more poorly in school and on standardized tests than white and Asian youths, regardless of income.

Almost half of black children attending Cleveland public schools fail to graduate, and only a fraction will ever finish college. What's new is the identification of a leading culprit. The report argues that no amount of money or strategy will close the gap as long as black children are raised in an environment that devalues education. "School is life, and that is the message our kids are not getting, and a lot of this is culture," said Goler, 41, a former schoolteacher who is PolicyBridge's executive director. "We have to reverse this anti-education mind-set that our kids have."

The authors trace underachievement to the breakdown of the black family, a trend Daniel Patrick Moynihan publicized in 1965, when he reported that 25 percent of black children were born to single mothers. Today, more than 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Absent fathers, and with families weakened, corrupting influences gained power and prestige, the report argues. Rap music, poverty and pop-culture celebrities combine to create an alluring "cool-pose culture of self-destructive behaviors." The report cites research by a social psychologist who found that black youths enjoy the highest self esteem of any ethnic group, regardless of their grades. It quotes a Cleveland boy who said he ceased to be taunted at school when he let his grades fall. And it includes the observations of a youth mentor, who said he has been told by children he is the only adult in their lives excited to see their report cards.

"This is sort of a silent killer," McShepard said. "Every day, our community is being chipped away at. And because there's no one big horrible event, no one pays a lot of attention."

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the leader of Cleveland schools from 1998 to 2006, said she has not yet read the report but that its conclusions sound a bit extreme. The black achievement gap results from "a number of variables," she said. "I'm not sure I would classify it in such strong language as anti-education culture." Former Ohio Senate Minority Leader C.J. Prentiss, who is the governor's special representative for closing the achievement gap, also worries the report is too critical of black parents. "That's a piece of it," she said. "How about the role of the churches, the business community, the teachers?"

The report indeed calls for multifaceted action. It recommends that the federal No Child Left Behind Act be amended to treat black boys as a distinct category deserving of special attention, including a longer school year. It calls upon black parents and civic leaders to raise their expectations of black pupils. And it urges black men to "step up" as role models for fatherless youths. "We've reached crisis proportions," McShepard said. "We need to do something different."

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Australian Students resent 'guilt' in Leftist history teaching

HIGH school students resent being made to feel guilty during their study of Australia's indigenous past and dislike studying national history in general. The History Teachers Association called yesterday for a rethink of the type of Australian history being taught in schools and the way in which it is taught.

History Teachers Association of NSW executive officer Louise Zarmati said her experience teaching in western Sydney was that students were resistant to learning about Australian politics and, in particular, indigenous history. "This is a somewhat delicate subject but they don't like the indigenous part of Australian history," she told a hearing of the Senate inquiry into the academic standards of school education in Sydney yesterday. "The feedback I get is they're not prepared to wear the guilt. They find it's something that's too personal, too much of a personal confrontation for them. "I think it sparks a lot of racism; it certainly did in my classroom. It makes it an unpleasant learning experience."

Australia's indigenous history has been a contentious issue in the ongoing "history wars" over the interpretation of European colonisation. Historian Geoffrey Blainey brought the phrase "black armband view of history" to prominence in 1993 to describe the portrayal of European colonisation as shameful. The description was picked up in 1996 by John Howard, who later launched an offensive on the teaching of Australian history in schools. The Government is now in the process of developing a national curriculum for Australian history.

Until this year, NSW was the only state in which Australian history was a compulsory stand-alone subject for students in years 7 to 10. In years 9 and 10, students study 20th century Australian history focusing on the workings of government and the history of politics, and the subject is examined in the Higher School Certificate.

Ms Zarmati said more than 20,000 students studied history for the HSC last year, of whom more than 11,000 studied ancient history, making it the most popular history course in the English-speaking world.

Ms Zarmati said history teachers constantly struggled with the unpopularity of Australian history in years 9 and 10. "They don't really enjoy it and feel forced to do it; they don't like the politics all that much," she said. "My personal opinion is that it's the nature of the beast. "Teenagers at that stage aren't mature enough to understand the concepts but when they get to years 11 and 12, they really enjoy Australian history because they're looking at problems and issues and debates."

In other evidence to the Senate inquiry, literacy expert Max Coltheart said the federal Government's budget initiatives to improve literacy and numeracy standards with programs costing more than $500million over four years was a "waste of money". The budget included a scheme granting up to $50,000 to schools that showed a significant rise in literacy and numeracy standards, and vouchers worth $700 to provide one-on-one tuition for students failing to meet minimum national literacy and numeracy standards. Professor Coltheart, professor of psychology and head of the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, said the commonwealth should stipulate the type of reading tests schools had to use to qualify for the grants. He said children who struggled to learn to read were labelled as having a learning difficulty but they actually suffered a teaching difficulty. The budget funding would be better spent on training primary school teachers how to teach reading properly.

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Australian school science courses 'pre-Newtonian'

SCIENCE in years 8 to 10 in Queensland is essentially descriptive, with courses failing to recognise the scientific revolution triggered by Isaac Newton in 1687, leaving students woefully unprepared for senior study. Submissions to the Senate inquiry into the academic standards of school education argue the calibre of maths and science taught is low by international standards, the quality of teaching is poor and the courses fail to stretch bright students.

A submission from a maths teacher of 40 years' standing, who co-authored a series of textbooks and worked with the Queensland Board of Senior Secondary School Studies, said that maths to the end of Year 10 "fails abjectly" to provide students with the skills to progress to more rigorous maths or the physical sciences. "That this has been allowed to go on for decades is a scandal," John Ridd said. Dr Ridd said the standard of algebra taught in Queensland schools was poor and there was "now no numerical science in years 8/9/10". "It is a sad fact that science in the years up to the end of Year 10 in Queensland is essentially all descriptive. It is non-numerical, pre-Newtonian," he said.

Dr Ridd said the "awful gap" between the standard of maths at the end of Year 10 and the start of Year 11 had required a lowering in the standard of maths taught. "Maths has had to be softened, weakened, by a large amount," Dr Ridd said. "Work that used to be done in years 8/9/10 now appears in the first sections of the Year 11 maths B texts. "Naturally the longer-term effect of that is that the standards reached by the end of Year 12 have declined -- with implications for the next stage -- university maths, physical science and engineering. There is a gap there too."

Dr Ridd's concerns are echoed in a submission by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute and the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics, which says the long tail among Australian students "of under-achievement and failure is apparent well before the end of secondary education". The AMSI and ICE-EM submission argues that the OECD maths skills test often quoted as showing Australian 15-year-olds perform highly "is not a valid assessment" of maths knowledge, with some of the questions "effectively general aptitude tests rather than mathematical ones".

The submission says that a better guide to the standard of students is the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study of Year 8 students, which tests curriculum content. Its results show that by the early years of high school, a large proportion of students already lack the background skills necessary for intermediate and advanced level maths courses in years 11 and 12.

The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers agrees that students are failing to reach their full potential in maths, and attributes this to poor teaching, modelled on methods used in the 1960s that "foster memorisation as opposed to deep learning". But the association says Australian students compare favourably with their international counterparts and the achievement standards in courses compared well to those expected of overseas students. "We believe there is a disproportionate focus on comparisons between the states and territories, particularly through the media, which is not helpful to improving standards," it says.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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