re: Resegregation in the American South

i read the majority of that article (i thought this was from an NPR piece i read yesterday, but apparently the NPR piece was just summarizing/commenting on this Atlantic piece)

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“My biggest fear right now is the ACT,” D’Leisha said. “I don’t have a good score. It’s been on my mind a lot.” She described an ACT study session she’d attended last summer at a community college. “We were with kids from Northridge, and they knew things we didn’t know,” she said. “They had done things we hadn’t done.”

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this would only really apply to math. math is the only part of the ACT that requires prior knowledge of a specific subject

reading comp and the science portion are the same thing (reading/analyzing data presented)

the english section does require some prior knowledge, but it's basic english stuff that you learn in middle school. if you're in an AP english class, you should have no problem with the basics (note: i did not take AP english in high school, even though it was offered)

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As the students began to write, a girl sitting to his left scrunched up her nose and raised her hand. She couldn’t spell a word she wanted to use in her essay. Jones told her to look it up in one of the heavy red dictionaries in the baskets below their desks.

“You know what I don’t understand?” the girl said, a pen poised at her lips. “You always tell us to look up the word. How are we supposed to look a word up if we don’t know to spell it?”

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oh...THAT is the sort of AP english class this was? we seriously learned that skill in elementary school, and it should be painfully obvious to any person of reasonable intelligence. that is just a sign of pure ignorance and/or a lack of moderate intelligence

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Jones stopped. His eyes scanned each of the 17 brown faces looking expectantly back at him. Then he gave an answer that seemed to sum up their educational experience. “What do we say about struggling?” he asked. “You have to work through the struggle.”

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i applaud his philosophy, though

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Jones didn’t waste time setting the boisterous class to task. The AP exam was approaching. Students who didn’t score high enough wouldn’t get college credit for the class. Even though the 17 girls and boys gathered in front of him made up Central’s brightest, their practice essay about a poem hadn’t gone so well.

D’Leisha raised her hand, her brow furrowed. How many kids had made the cutoff last year? she asked. Only two students had, but the teacher dodged the question. “I really do believe all of you can make those scores,” he said.

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again, i applaud his efforts, but those AP classes seem very wasteful if only 2 are scoring well

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She had taken the ACT college-entrance exam twice already. The first time she scored a 16, the second time a 17.

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Late last year, D’Leisha took the ACT for the third time, but her score dropped back to 16. So early on a Saturday in February, she got up quietly, forced a few bites of a muffin into her nervous stomach, and drove once again to the community college where the test is administered. A few weeks later, she got her score: 16 again. She contemplated a fifth attempt, but could see little point.

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a 16-17 is a pretty terrible score. a consistent 16-17 shows you where you're at as a student and thinker

that's cruel, but that's life. for comparison's sake, my gifted class scores in the 16-17 range...in 7th grade (i scored a 20 or 21, i can't remember. a few years after my class, one exceptionally bright student got in the high 20s). so she is testing, as a senior in high school taking "AP" classes, on the level of a gifted kid in the 7th grade

i had similar experiences in high school. when our quiz bowl team would go to the urban-black or rural-white schools, they would often display their school's top ACT scores. typically these scores were in the low 20s

I'd like to point out how pathetic the writer of this article is.

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In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools—meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central—has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South now attend such schools—a figure likely to rise as court oversight continues to wane.

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Asswipe KNOWS the midwest has most of the "apartheid" schools, he still takes a swipe at the south and seems to lament that court oversight is waning.

Hey a-hole. How bout bitching about the fact there is NO court oversight where MOST of this is happening? Looks to me that while the courts have been paying attention to the south, northern whites have had a blast.

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Yeah...this is bullshite. As if this problem has only ever existed in the South.

My maternal grandparents grew up in a small town in Illinois. There was a law at that time that stated blacks were not allowed inside the city limits after dark and it was strictly enforced.

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The whole country was f'ed up...it's just that the south was even more recalcitrant in its hate than the rest.

That was a long but interesting read. Author did a pretty good job of educating on a tough issue.

Kids attending a school system like central have no chance. The education is massively substandard. The teachers are often castoffs that have been fired from other schools and end up there. The kids come from poor families that can't leave or send them to a better school, so they are stuck. Plus the fact many of the families in west end are poor means they are probably not well educated to begin with and aren't going to be any help.

The people with means, primarily white people in the case of the articleicle, but blacks with means too, aren't going to send their kids to a substandard school, so they leave and it becomes a downward spiral for the school and students that are left behind.

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Fact is the schools failed her.

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So let's spend more money, right? All they need is more tax dollars.

I did a quick comparison of Tuscaloosa Central High School with Highland Park High School in the richest suburb of Dallas.

Tuscaloosa Central HS spending per pupil: $9,170

Highland Park HS spending per pupil: $8,226

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The home life is probably a failure as well.

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In regard to education, this is the problem. It isn't the school. More successful students have the proper guidance and environment at home that enables success. Schools can't provide this and aren't supposed to.

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But the kids that go there are no more or less intelligent than anyone else at another school. The fact is they are not learning anything even though they probably could in the right situation.

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Absolutely. And the "right situation" would be a more conducive environment at home for learning or having access to successful students away from home with whom to study, such as in study groups. Years ago when I was in high school, I sometimes met two or three times a week after school with other students who were motivated. I did this in college as well. Everyone in those groups excelled. Why? Because they wanted to excel.

Agree. And better teachers. The article pointed out that the teachers that teach their are often castoffs fired from other places.

At the end of the day it is a black culture and socio-economic problem. The family unit is the root of the problem, but it is the problem for many reasons that start with black culture as a whole and is largely influenced by economic status. It is a multi-generational problem that isn't getting any better. Sorta a chicken and egg question at this point of is it the poor economic status from the start that makes it hard to succeed or a cultural problemthat makes taking a step up in economic class a problem.

Not saying it isn't possible to succeed coming from a tough environment, but it is infinitely more difficult as generations of data show most people born into a given socio-economic class die in the same class as do their children.

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Not saying it isn't possible to succeed coming from a tough environment, but it is infinitely more difficult as generations of data show most people born into a given socio-economic class die in the same class as do their children.

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But but what about Ben Carson? People on the right will die denying historical and/or socioeconomic causation for disparity in anything, it makes their head hurt to think about it. The new narrative is "well everything is equal now so whats up with the blacks".

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...low-performing, virtually all-black schools.

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It's the white man's fault.