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feministtexican on August 25th, 2010
 Say what you will about Spike Lee’s polemics; the man knows how to craft a powerful narrative. Whereas Part One of If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise opened with the excitement of the Saint’s Superbowl win, the opening montage of Part Two—filled with footage of the havoc wreaked by the oil spill—set the somber tone for the final chapter of the two-part documentary series. The footage especially set the tone for the last hour of Lee’s documentary, which serves as a scathing indictment of British Petroleum and the government’s handling of the crisis.
At the beginning of Creek, Lee focuses on the broken New Orleans school system. There is a brief, uplifting story of community activism, in which citizens got together and gutted Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School themselves to begin restoration. Sadly, this is one of the few uplifting moments in Part Two. Using the story of this school as a springboard, Lee begins interviewing people who have contradicting opinions about Paul Vallas, the man brought in to revamp the school system, and the man largely responsible for all of the charter schools that have sprung up in the years following Katrina.
It is painfully apparent that more high-quality schools are needed; Part One of Creek touched on this fact when Catherine Montana Gordon mentioned how she couldn’t go back to New Orleans because of the lack of educational programs for her autistic son. However, it is also clear that school employees are currently ill-equipped to handle the students who are still struggling to cope with their psychological trauma. Several interviewees emphasized the need for teachers who aren’t afraid of the students and the community, especially of their black male students. They also emphasized the need for teachers to put emphasis on their students’ self-worth.
Violence has also skyrocketed in New Orleans, compounding the effects of the psychological trauma its citizens are experiences. The murder rate is 20% higher rate than the rest of the country, with 210 murders in 2007 alone.
Those who watched When the Levees Broke may recall Dinerral Shavers, the bright-eyed young man who give a tour of his devastated neighborhood while recounting the horrors of all the dead bodies left to rot in homes. In the years after Katrina, Shavers was a positive role model for his community, teaching at Robert Wayne High School and creating the Hot 8 Brass Band. In 2006, Shavers was shot in the back of the head and killed by a 15 year old.
Another person that viewers may recall from Levees is Donnell Harrington, one of the victims of a violent racial hate crime in Algiers Point committed by white men just days after Katrina hit. Though the man who shot him has since been convicted and sentenced, Harrington is still traumatized by the gunshots. Since Levees, Harrington was shot again, this time by a black man with an AK-47; it was a random act of violence, and Harrington lost part of his leg as a result.
More after the jump.
quadmoniker on July 21st, 2010
[cross-posted from TAPPED]
Ross Douthat spent his precious column real estate Monday on the plight of poor, white Christians from red states who suffer disproportionately, he says, from elite-college admissions policies that favor lower-income black and Hispanic students over them. He borrows liberally from a blog post by Russell K. Nieli on Minding the Campus, who based his argument on a year-old study from two Princeton University social scientists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford.
The study looked at admissions rates for seven elite colleges. The study definitely found, as Nieli wrote, that admissions officers give preference to lower-class black and Hispanic applicants, but it’s worth looking at that fact in context. Overall the applicant pool was extremely well off: only about 10 percent of the applications to elite institutions, public or private, came from lower- and working-class families, and only about 19 percent of those applicants were admitted to elite private schools (acceptance rates to the public institutions didn’t correlate highly with class). The private schools in the study did tend to weigh lower- and working-class black and Hispanic applicants more heavily than their better-off counterparts, but there wasn’t an advantage for lower- and working-class whites compared with whites from higher socioeconomic levels who, incidentally, made up most of the applicants. Other studies show this likely stems from a failure to account for a sort of income-based achievement gap, and not, of course, outright animosity toward poor whites. It’s also possible that schools want to admit students who can pay first, but many elite colleges have need-blind admissions processes.
The important thing is that, overall, the study shows what we already know. The vast majority of applicants to elite institutions and the vast majority of those admitted are white and middle- or upper-middle class. Where Douthat goes really astray, though, is when he borrows Nieli’s claim that cultural markers seemed to make a difference as well.
Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”
It’s too bad that Douthat seems not to have read the actual study, because he would have found that that’s, at best, overreaching with the data.
More…
Ed. Note: I’m guest-blogging at The American Prospect this week. This post is cross-posted from TAPPED.
Yesterday, New York City finally shuttered its notorious “rubber rooms,” the Kafkaesque solution devised by officials to deal with teachers who were deemed unfit to remain in classrooms but, armed with tenure, were essentially unfireable. [...]
via Fort Worth Squatch, by Creative Commons.
When critics of standardized testing talk about how such tests are culturally biased, there’s a tendency to dismiss that concern as a bunch of p.c. claptrap. But what tests do is measure how well kids get the mechanics of the task; they’re actually [...]
by tanakwho, via Creative Commons.
Last week, Arne Duncan met with leaders and faculty from HBCUs to touted the financial support the White House had thrown behind black colleges, but also to press them to improve their graduation rates, which lag behind those of non-HBCUs (a disparity that is [...]
Jamelle on May 27th, 2010
It seems that segregation is making it’s way back into New Orleans’ public schools:
Three out of five schools are dominated by minorities with fewer than 30 percent of their attendees being white. Of those schools, 84 percent of them are considered “very high poverty schools,” where more than 75 percent [...]
Jamelle on May 25th, 2010
from Wheelz24, via Creative Commons.
[cross-posted from U.S. of J.]
C.H. at Democracy in America flags a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts on the effect of marriage on economic mobility for children:
Messrs DeLeire and Lopoo find that marriage has a positive effect on economic mobility for children of all races. [...]
Brokey McPoverty on May 12th, 2010
I have had the most difficult time writing this article. It took me the whole of Confederate History Month (known also as April) to do.
I figured it was just because I’m over-thinking, as I always do, bending far too often to the little internal editor who keeps reminding me that my language isn’t vivid enough, that I’m being repetitive, that my metaphors are corny and I should erase my last five lines and start over again. I was five pages of rambling notes and decapitated paragraphs in when I realized that I’m struggling so much because this is a story that I’m tired of telling. I’ve been trying to write it down since I graduated from college in 2004 and I am weary of the words. I screamed them vainly from my freshman year to my senior, and once I left the campus for good, diploma in hand, I decided I would just shut up about it for awhile. I was drained. Even now, six years later, it’s hard.
More after the jump.
President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and senior staff, react in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as the House passes the health care reform bill,, March 21, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
So you may have heard: after eluding progressive presidents and lawmakers for nearly a century, House [...]
R.A.B. on March 16th, 2010
“I just don’t think it makes much sense,” he shrugged. “His college is paid for; he can go anywhere he wants to go, anywhere in the state. I’m not dishing out forty-two thousand dollars so that–”
“It’s not going to cost him forty-two thousand dollars! It’s not going to cost you anything. He’s paying for it! He is!”
Yes, that was the plan, until one particular acceptance letter invited the present furor into his home. The shouting downstairs had torn into his dreams; now the boy couldn’t sleep.
“…and what if he can’t? I’m cosigning, right? What if he can’t pay? Then what?”
“What do you want me to say?”
More after the jump…
Alisa on March 12th, 2010
Conversations pertaining to the persistent problem of how to increase teacher effectiveness tend to yield more questions than answers. The intuitive strategy of choosing exceptional students and overachievers in the hopes that they will in turn be exceptional teachers sounds right, but doesn’t work. Attributes that are fuzzy and difficult to quantify such as [...]
At a Teach for America event on black boys and education here in NYC, a panel of academics, education professionals, and a bizarre, pointless collection of celebrities (Eric Snow, Common, and John Legend) discuss education reform.
When singer John Legend agreed to talk on a Teach for America panel about his [...]
quadmoniker on March 2nd, 2010
(x-posted from TAPPED)
A former champion of No Child Left Behind has written a book criticizing the policy as a failure, especially because it relies on standardized testing. Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch also says school choice is a bad idea:
“There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition,” Ravitch [...]
G.D. on February 26th, 2010
photo by Thomas Favre-Bulle. Used via Creative Commons.
At the risk of belaboring the point on just how ridiculous our current teacher tenure policies are and the role the teacher’s unions play in keeping them that way, it should be pointed out that in New York City, which has a [...]
Alisa on February 2nd, 2010
In our previous discussions here about how the standard of education provided in America’s public schools might be improved we keep circling back to two issues: teacher quality and effectiveness and their relationship (or non-relationship at present) to teacher tenure. On the surface the matter is simple enough – we need teachers to be effective, and we need to be able to get rid of those who are not. However, to operationalize such a policy requires a definition of what a good or effective teacher is or does and a metric for measuring said effectiveness. Since education occupies a somewhat romanticized space in the minds of many as a vocation, the question of what makes a teacher “good” is hotly debated. Isn’t it just that some people are inherently better at teaching and truly great teaching is dependent on intangibles that are too difficult to quantify? Maybe not. In this month’s edition of The Atlantic, Amanda Ripley explores the work done by Teach for America in identifying the qualities of outstanding teachers.
More after the jump.
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