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The Atlantic: “The Other Segregation”
The Atlantic has an excellent piece on the divisive nature of education and socio-economic/racial disparity. If you recall, Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been tasked with fixing our education system. Few changes have been made. In New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School, only 1% of the students identify as African-American. This is in New York City, one of the most diverse areas in the United States. Only 1% identify, whereas nearly 17% of students nationally are identified as being African-American.
Clearly, Ms. DeVos has not taken her role seriously. Students are being segregated, not only by color, but primarily by academic ability. As the Atlantic makes clear:
But more troubling, and often less discussed, is the modern-day form of segregation that occurs within the same school through academic tracking, which selects certain students for gifted and talented education (GATE) programs. These programs are tasked with challenging presumably smart students with acceleration and extra enrichment activities. Other students are kept in grade-level classes, or tracked into remedial courses that are tasked with catching students up to academic baselines.
Students who do not score highly enough to be in Gifted and Talented Education are being demoted and tossed into grade-level classes. In cases where they cannot meet grade-level requirements, they are even being tracked into remedial courses! What does DeVos say about this? Nothing.
This institutionalized racism has also tracked students into these lower-capability classes. Instead of putting students of color into advanced placement classes at a racially proportionate rate, they are instead being placed based on achievement. Children of diverse socioeconomic and racial backgrounds are being disproportionately tracked into standard general education, rather than college-prep or advanced placement.
Black students are regularly excluded from schools’ conceptions of what it means to be gifted, talented, or advanced. There are real, systemic factors that fuel the disparity in access to gifted and specialized education. A history of racist policies, such as housing segregation and unequal funding, means that schools with a high proportion of black students often have resource constraints for specialized programs. Teachers’ biases against black students limit their chances for selective advanced opportunities. Admissions into gifted programs and specialized schools are based on a singular standardized test that often ignores qualifications aligned with a student’s training and does not capture black students’ potential. Minority students, particularly black students, are also often over-policed, which can affect their educational opportunities.
These children are being diverted into these lower-levels of education at an alarming rate due to the locations of their homes. They are being educated according to the resources available at their district; this does not meet the vast resources provided to elite schools where the populations are significantly more melanin-challenged. Additionally, testing does not take into account the unique cultural expressions and needs of minority students. The objective exam does not allow for consideration of extra-curriculars, popularity with authority figures, or ethnic descent. Economic privilege also imparts certain knowledge via experience of the parents. If a parent is well educated, as is often the case in a higher socioeconomic class, the child may advance from the knowledge. An extension could be discussed, rather than a parent saying that a deadline is a deadline and should be adhered to at all costs. This is patently unfair to students from undereducated ethnic minority groups who do not have the privilege to know to ask for an extension or for disciplinary action to be dismissed.
Furthermore, parents of higher-achieving students may actually advocate for their children; they may attend meetings, read school emails, and insist upon interaction with the administration of the school. Perhaps more concerningly, they will advocate for their children even to the detriment of others! This socioeconomic and racial privilege cannot be allowed to continue!
As was so well said:
Despite knowing that doing the best for their children often means leaving other children, often low-income students or students of color, with fewer opportunities, the knowledge doesn’t change their behavior.
These parents will not even change their behaviors! They will continue to do what is best for their own children.
Where does it end?
Quotes taken from The Atlantic
Published in General
With their children going to Harvard and coming out as protesters gluing their breasts to the roadways.
H/T @mattbalzer
Seriously, though. This Atlantic author actually declined to send her kids to GATE because of the racial disparities. Instead, she decided to work at the PTA, etc.
It is insanity.
Yes, Progressivism always has been.
I’m not even sure this post is a snark or not.
You are touching a throbbing nerve with millions of parents here.
Ya, by grouping kids of like academic achievement, schools systems are unintentionally discriminately against the poor in a sense because the kids of the poor for a variety of reasons consistently statistically achieve less academically. But you seem to be saying that the kids from good families with a good family life and proper parenting (disregarding race or economic background for those kids comes from all races and economic backgrounds) should be used as cannon fodder for your desires to upgrade the educational experience of kids from dysfunctional families. A disgusting thought indeed.
Our Progressive, permissive school systems that hand out few or little negative consequences for bad behavior have over decades created many, many schools that are simply unsafe for our children. Compounding that problem is a legal and welfare system that has encouraged fatherless and dysfunctional families resulting in many kids with severe emotional issues coming to schools that horribly exacerbate the school safety issue. As a result, the quality of school life and the safety of a school are often the number one issue for parents who genuinely care for their children.
The problem of appropriate diversity, academic achievement and school safety is a very complex one involving many facets of our society and one that your post doesn’t even begin to recognize the complexity of. To call out Betsy DeVos for not handling this issue the way the clowns at The Atlantic prefer is just the height of ridiculousness. Schools systems by themselves cannot solve these problems and to blame the problem on her when she is the first in a long while that has begun to even address the myriad of problems created by our schools is just disgusting.
I seriously don’t believe that a school for gifted children should be dumbed down “for diversity”.
I believe the answer is contained here.
It is absolutely is and no, because I’m not addressing this seriously. It is very complex and unlike some people, I’m not actually calling out Betsy DeVos as somehow the sole reason for our problems.
The author of the piece is not only working against her children’s best interests, but not helping other children very much either. By preventing her children from going, she’s actively “whitening” the programs that she is railing against. Without their representation, it is highly unlikely that the programs will be able to respond to the needs of children of diverse backgrounds within the program…because there aren’t any. It is easiest to respond to their needs when they are known.
The Onion is already facing increased competition from The Babylon Bee. This Atlantic outfit only makes the situation wor… what’s that? This isn’t intended to be satire?
Never mind, then.
Okay, a terrific post by TheRightNurse. In today’s climate, courageous, too. Thanks, TRN!
Funny how that works.
A new masthead slogan for The Atlantic: “Seriously, you guys…”
When I quit private school after seven years and went back to public school for the 11th grade I was bored to tears with the elementary level of education taking place. Thankfully, near the end of that year one of my teachers suggested I start taking the AP (advanced placement) courses.
After decades of Affirmative Action the facts are in: It failed.
Back in sixth grade at P.S. 40 in Manhattan they experimented with merging the gifted and talented students with some of the students who were being brought in from lower income areas and who were not on the G&T track. Ended at mid-semester after one of the sixth graders brought in exposed himself to one of the girls in the class (not sure how that would play out 50 years later — you’d have the demand for diversity within the G&T track running into the attacks on toxic masculinity, even if we’re talking 11- and 12-year-old boys here).
But they were already having battles over the academic exam to enter Stuyvesant being racially biased in the 1970s (as well as the same exam for Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — our group in 1972 was the first one where they actually gave you your test score plus the cutoff point for entry. In my case, on a scale of 0 to 180 you had to score at least a 121, or 67 percent, to get into Stuyvesant in 1972). Back at that time, the protest centered on the academic high schools in New York being too Jewish instead of being too Asian, but that was because the first big wave of Asian immigrant children weren’t scoring high enough on the English portion of the test to win acceptance, while their math scores were fine. That’s not the case anymore, which is why the objections today mirror the efforts at places like Harvard to try and keep too many Asian students from being accepted.
The first real effort to scuttle the academic school tests came after Jimmy Carter was elected, when one of the initial moves of the new Department of Education was to try and eliminate them on racial grounds. And it would have worked, if American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker hadn’t been a Stuyvesant grad and threatened to used one of his nuclear weapons against Democrats in the 1978 midterms if they killed off the academic high schools.
OK, is this a satire or not?
It’s not like they are unaware of this, but their own policies exacerbate it and make it worse.
In this, it’s my solid opinion that you have to take a long view on it. The first generation has to get economically stable – not well off, just stable. The next generation builds off that stability.
People weren’t ready for universities overnight. First, we had to feed ourselves. Then we needed to be more efficient at it. Then we used our new free time to be educated.
Throwing money at the problem in welfare has not helped.
Yes.
There are two types of satire, @kentforrester. Only one kind is intentional.
Is it satire by a writer for The Atlantic. Or is it a conservative pretending it is a piece written by a writer for The Atlantic?
Neither. It is a satire by a conservative of a piece that appeared in the Atlantic.
It’s good satire. The idea that we could have a centralized public school system with large input nationally, organized by educational unions formed by folks who come out of the least competitive programs our universities offer is absurd. That something as important as education could be run as a monopoly in the largest most rapidly changing economy on earth is crazy. What public schools should teach, how and by whom the giant bureaucracy can’t know a priori and uniformly, but a centralized nation wide school system must behave as if it did. New Zealand abolished its educational bureaucracy, let parents decide where to send their children and the money followed the children. They went from the bottom of the west’s educational system to the top, just behind Finland and Singapore. Parents and teachers sorted it out.
Does the Atlantic only publish idiots? I cannot imagine a more abusive parent than the author of this article.
Ah, thanks Mark. But isn’t my #2 the same as your #3?
No. The article in The Atlantic is real and serious. The Right Nurse is merely mentioning it while rolling her eyes.
Oh, I thought it was a parody. My bad.
Truth in today’s world has overshot all parody. We have put the crazy people in charge of nearly everything.
My Bad, The Right Nurse. I didn’t understand it was satire, but I thought it might be. That said the opinion of the The Atlantic writer is so clueless it’s frightening.
I don’t know if it’s so much that they’re in charge as it is they’re blinded by the ability of the crazies on social media to essentially bow up like a cat and make themselves look bigger than they actually are, often by the use of sock puppets and fake accounts.
People who would have been restrained in the past see all the strident loons posting, think there must be millions of strident loons out there and then think they have to pander to those strident loons by acting like one themselves. And it helps if you’re in general sympathetic to many of the causes that the strident loons you’re listening to are pushing (i.e. — the “Get woke, go broke” belief, where CEOs and media people will cost their companies millions to pander to the loudest, angriest people on the left instead of just ignoring them, because they’re sort of liberal themselves, but have been convinced that America is full of angry woke people who want intersectionality in their products, whether it’s their razor blades, their sports broadcasts, or their favorite movie series). Education also tends to be where a lot of the angry loons go to hang out as adults, because having that mentality in the private sector is usually a fast way to unemployment, because you can’t play nice with your co-workers when you’re looking to be affronted 24/7/365, and the result is things like mindset that created The Atlantic’s article.
Many of the Left’s causes celebres that we are dealing with today are reruns of what was going on in the 1970s. This is (arguably) largely due to the similarities in how the demographics of today compare to the demographics of the 1970s. i.e. A very large bulge in the college-aged demographic cohort. If demographics are destiny, then in about ten years we should have a rerun of the 1980s, in which many (most?) of today’s “revolutionaries” become stockbrokers.
The Atlantic article is a perfectly rational argument based on at least three flawed premises.
One flawed premise is that everyone has the same innate capabilities. This is not true. Unfortunately, there is significant evidence that in a number of important areas, the distribution of innate capabilities varies significantly between different population groups.
A second flawed premise is that all family structures are equally conducive to success in life. This is not true. Unfortunately, the incidence of inferior family structures is greater among certain racial and ethnic minority groups.
A third flawed premise is that all cultures are equally conducive to life success. This is not true. Unfortunately, the incidence of the most destructive cultural ideas are concentrated among certain racial and ethnic minority groups.
If you accept any of these premises — and especially if you accept all of them — then you must conclude that differential achievement is the result of cheating, generally expressed as an accusation of (invidious) discrimination. This is not true, because the premises are false.
Evan Sayet’s excellent talk at the Heritage Foundation (here) in 2007 explained this very effectively. It has been obvious for far, far longer. Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind on this topic in 1987, the great philosopher Geddy Lee (of Rush) sang The Trees in 1978, and Kurt Vonnegut wrote Harrison Bergeron in 1961.
Rather than facing reality, Leftists vilify anyone who points out the facts as evil, using the standard slurs — racist, sexist, islamophobe, and so on. It is a convenient way to stop people from thinking. Interestingly, contrary to Orwell’s thesis, the effectiveness of this method of thought control does not appear to require enforcement by the state, though its adherents often want to use state power as an enforcement tool if they manage to obtain such power.
I’ve been formulating a hypothesis that the psychological sources of this strange world view are fear and resentment. It seems to be unusually concentrated among people in the 110-125 IQ range (though this impression is just anecdotal). This group faces a unique developmental path — they generally excel in high school, and therefore have the high self-esteem associated with being a “winner,” but then do not excel in the more competitive college environment, and fail to adjust to their limitations.
I am not sure how to test this hypothesis.