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Who Matters?

Jill

Consider these high school graduation statistics. Assume that students can be divided into groups. These groups can reflect gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, economic status, or some other characteristic that we’re dividing into categories (I realize this is problematic in itself, but let’s go with it). Now when we evaluate the whole pool of students for one of these characteristics, 72 percent of group A graduates; 65 percent of group B graduates. When we evaluate the same pool of students for a different characteristic, we see that 78 percent of one group graduates, while only 55 percent of the other group does.

What should make news? The 72/65 split, or the 78/55 one? Should it matter if one of those statistics represents a gender split, and the other represents race? Should it matter who the lower numbers reflect?

It shouldn’t, but we can’t be surprised when it does. Seventy-eight percent of white students graduated from high school in 2003, compared with 55 percent of black students. That’s a huge difference, and a great big problem. But what makes headlines? What do conservatives focus on? The fact that 72 percent of girls graduated from high school in 2003, compared to 65 percent of boys. Because if boys are being harmed, we’ve got to do something about it! If it’s black folks, though, they need to improve themselves and take personal responsibility. (No one talks about “the soft bigotry of low expectations” for under-achieving white boys).

Oh, and it should be mentioned that the overall graduation rate is 70 percent, meaning that a whopping five percent of boys are being “left behind” the average — compared to 15 percent of black students, and 17 percent of Hispanic students.

And yet the title of the report is, “Leaving Boys Behind.”

As Broadsheet emphasizes, we do need to make sure that girls and boys are able to do their best in school, and we do need to track things like graduation rates according to gender. But when the race gap is so much larger than the gender gap, you’d think that would be worth focusing on. Instead, this study has served as another reflection of our skewed value systems: We care about the success of white males first and foremost. If boys are under-performing, that’s the story, and it’s probably the fault of feminists for “feminizing” education, so we need to fix it so that boys will do better. But if black students are under-performing at far more alarming levels, well, they just need to pull themselves up and quit being so damn lazy and stop blaming whitey for all their problems.

25 thoughts on Who Matters?

  1. They might want to get exercised about the 70 overall rate while they’re at it.

    Jesus, that’s low.

  2. So, all other problems in secondary ed should be ignored until the problems you care about are addressed?

    You fault conservatives for focusing on the gender issue rather than the race issue. Is it possible conservatives are more concerned about the gender issue because it affects them more?

    An argument parallel to yours would be (equally nonsensical, too) that because women in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa are victimized as a cultural practice and that is such a greater victimization than the problems faced by women in this country that many American feminists have a “skewed value system” for focusing on American women.

  3. So, all other problems in secondary ed should be ignored until the problems you care about are addressed?

    I said this… where? Maybe this will help:

    As Broadsheet emphasizes, we do need to make sure that girls and boys are able to do their best in school, and we do need to track things like graduation rates according to gender. But when the race gap is so much larger than the gender gap, you’d think that would be worth focusing on.

    When I say that something “would be worth focusing on,” that does not mean that said thing should be the only thing we focus on. Far from it. The preceeding sentence should have made that clear. I was criticizing the report for emphasizing the gender gap when the race gap is so much more substantial. Doesn’t mean that I don’t think the gender gap matters.

  4. Is it either/or? What percentage of the boys who do not graduate are white? Perhaps this is one of those areas where the intersection of race and gender says more than either one alone?

  5. Don’t the figures for boys and girls include minorities? So, it’s not white males we’re worried about, it’s males in general. And I would suspect that if you look at the graduation rates of white males, it’s much higher.

    But I think there’s something you might be missing. The solutions advocated by conservatives to solve the gender gap are different from the liberal solutions to solve the racial gap. Conservatives want a less feminized school environment. Some, like myself, would like to see the whole public school system scrapped in favor of a parent/student centered model. Liberals, on the other hand continue to either see the problems in terms of funding shortages or overly traditional teaching strategies. Having been a public school teacher for the past six years and having been educated at the Mecca of constructivism, CGU, I can tell you with confidence that neither funding nor teaching strategies are the general problems.

    The system is the problem. Our expectations and the method to reach them don’t work together.

  6. When I say that something “would be worth focusing on,” that does not mean that said thing should be the only thing we focus on. Far from it.

    Perhaps I was led astray by this:

    “What do conservatives focus on? The fact that 72 percent of girls graduated from high school in 2003, compared to 65 percent of boys. Because if boys are being harmed, we’ve got to do something about it! If it’s black folks, though, they need to improve themselves and take personal responsibility. (No one talks about “the soft bigotry of low expectations” for under-achieving white boys).”

    Implying that conservatives choose only to focus on the gender issues among high school students and ignoring the race issues. It is completely reasonable to paraphrase you: “all other problems in secondary ed should be ignored until the problems I care about are addressed.”

  7. I wouldn’t be surprised if African-American girls do much better than African-American boys in school. I haven’t seen statistics proving it, but there are statistics that show that African-American women are doing better overall than their male counterparts.

    I wonder if conservatives would be so hot and bothered to address the gender gap if the statistics showed that African-American boys are dragging the statistics down for boys overall.

  9. Hey Conservative Apologist:
    If males are doing badly in school, it is most definitely NOT female students that are to blame. Conservatives are ALL ABOUT buckling down and applying oneself. If boys have gotten the idea that they just don’t have to apply themselves, sit still and do their assignments, they need to learn that they are mistaken, and that that is EXACTLY what they have to do. You can’t think it’s all about personal responsibility EXCEPT when it comes to *your* son. I suppose you might want to get out that rod the Bible speaks of. Be consistent, if you want any respect at ALL. Otherwise you are just another Patriarchal Whiner.

  10. You fault conservatives for focusing on the gender issue rather than the race issue. Is it possible conservatives are more concerned about the gender issue because it affects them more?

    That would require their us/them to be consistent and reasonable rather than self-serving, wouldn’t it?

  11. Implying that conservatives choose only to focus on the gender issues among high school students and ignoring the race issues. It is completely reasonable to paraphrase you: “all other problems in secondary ed should be ignored until the problems I care about are addressed.”

    No, no it’s not. It’s not reasonable to infer from, “You’re ignoring this issue,” to, “You should focus only on this issue.”

  12. On the topic of blacks in secondary education, I’d like to direct people to Shannon’s post at Egotistical Whining. Also, there was an NY Times article last month called “Plight Deepens for Black Men.” (Naturally, it’s behind the subscription wall, but I’ve written a little bit about it here.)

  13. “So, it’s not white males we’re worried about, it’s males in general.”

    Which, of course, is why the Newsweek article a few months back featured picture of mostly white boys even though it’s mostly minority boys that are doing poorly. (what? they couldn’t find enough minority models? a school district that wasn’t majority white where they could take their pictures?)

    And failed to mention that while boys, as a group, are doing (kinda) poorly compared to girls, minority boys are doing really poorly compared to everyone else, and middle class white boys (you know, the ones that made up the majority of Newsweek’s visual aid?) are exactly on par with middle class white girls, and rich white boys are doing slightly better than rich white girls.

    Yes, I’m sure just like the stupid kids magazine I got when I was little that featured the headline “Who is Smarter: Boys or Girls?” this isn’t at all about beating the gender war drums – at the expense of logic or any real concern about kids.

  14. Hey Kathy McCarthy,

    If you were to go to the website and look around, you might realize that a large number of the people at the Manhattan institute focus on inner city issues. You might learn than one of the co-authors has a slew of articles on poor, disadvantaged, and minority kids and how to improve their school performance. Or his statistical analysis of how the brief voucher experiment in Florida had its greatest impact in improving performance of, you guessed it, Black boys.

    I talk to these kids (not enough, darn it) and young Black men *wish* they had two strikes against them. Between the general assumption that they are either thugs, into drugs, a dropout, or all of the above, they are told that achievement is ‘acting White’ and that, yup, only girls do well in school. With the fierce cultural opposition to homosexuality in the Black community, ‘acting like a girl’ is maybe worse than ‘acting White’.

    Sorry if I am coming across as ticked off – but I am. This is not the first time I have seen Conservatives and Liberals share a common cause (in this case, “schools need to improve”) and seen that chance to cooperate thrown away because one side or the other didn’t “do it right”. Unless you think its just AWESOME that boys’ performance in school is dropping year by year and that, yes, the drop off is fastest for the poor and minorities, then you should look at a Conservative think-tank with more than 1/3 its staff focused on urban issues and leap for freakin’ joy when they talk about an erosion in the school – even if you don’t like the group that is underperforming.

    BTW, some estimate that overall 4 year graduation rate of Black men is about 30%. in poor regions of Indiana (where I am from) the graduation rate of Black men is under 20%. TWENTY. FREAKIN’. PERCENT.

    If you still want to call a concern for dropping male performance in school “whining”, I would hate to see the conditions you would consider serious enough.

    You want to end chronic unemployment in minority populations? Study after study shows that A) a decent basic education is the best first step and B) they aren’t getting it. You want to make Blacks less beholden to the Man? Make sure they can read the fine print. Want to reduce fatherless families, family abandnment, increase suicide risk, untreated depression, chronic health issues, and homelessness? Improve their freakin’ education.

    Lousy education is a race issue AND a gender issue AND a just plain it sucks all over issue. You have a group of Conservatives agreeing with you – why is that a Bad Thing?

  16. Along similar lines, a loophole in No Child Left Behind allows school boards to exclude minority scores when reporting.

    I’m not sure I understand all of the reasoning behind this, since it’s midnight and I’ve been translating and analyzing Latin for the past four hours, but still. It’s part of the same attitude Jill’s brought up, in which certain groups’ problems are made to matter less.

  17. Deep Thought, white kids call each other nerds too. I got teased by white kids for being a nerd. For god’s sake, will the cultural deficiency lies ever go to rest? Not to mention, I’m pretty suspicious of vouchers. What’s the real reason behind them? Like I’m worried we’ll move to vouchers, most people won’t be able to pay the difference between the voucher and the tuition, public schools will be defunded, so we’ll be worse off than we started. Not to mention, they don’t have to take the hard cases,either. So instead of 20% in KKK country, we have 5%. Our goal is not to destory the public school system(the goal of conservatives) but to fix problems

  18. ‘Cultural deficiency lies’? Hmmm. SInce I got here and started reading comments (and at other Liberal sites) I have been reading about the harrassment of GLBT kids and how damaging that is – are they more fragile than nerds? Or is it only damaging ig you really *are* GLBT? Bullied kids do actually suffer – emotionally, in their performance, and in an increased likelihood of everything from drug use to suicide.

    Maybe they should just suck it up, eh?

    Vouchers have been tried in the recent past in Florida and, shocker, the results were not a collapse of public education, but a real, demonstrable, non-regressive improvement in poorly-performing schools. Since the most-poorly performing schools showed the greatest increases, the largest positive impact was on largely- or solely-minority enrollment schools.

    Once the voucher programs was ended, those schools began reverting to pre-voucher performance at an amazinf rate.

    Since most kids that used the targeted vouchers used them at other public schools, there was almost no “de-funding”. THe kids that did end up going to private schools were largely from the absolutely-worst performing schools and were able to find private schools that accepted their vouchers ‘as is’ with no further tuition.

    So. It worked in a real world test. Unlike anything coming out of the public school system and the NEA for the last 40 years, may I add.

    Nice swipe at me with the “KKK country” slur. I’ll refrain from the obvious rejoinder.

  20. So, why is it special if black kids call names? The idea that if black peopler do sdomethiung it’s because they are inferior, is totally off.Did you get that infomation from a think tank? If it was working so well, why did they stop? Public schools and ‘charter schools’ perform about the same, as well. I’ll list the names if you want. Rural Indiana is Klan country,but I’m so glad you refrained from calling me the n word.

  22. Shannon,
    I don’t like it when *anyone* uses bullying; it just has some cultural variations. It is a fact that some groups are more anti-homosexual than others. Just like some populations are more likely to marginalize, oh, those members that are more poor than others. It is no secret that the Black community has some stronger anti-homosexual tendencies.

    I am *from* rural Indiana and at least in my neck of the woods the Klan is seen as, at best, bufoons.

    The word I was thinking of was “bigot”.

  25. deep thoughts,
    another devastating post (#14). corresponds to my research on the issue, if you try to look at it objectively at all. (i know that’s hard for some people). i was educated in a school system where african-american students were in the majority. i can not count the number of times i watched an african-american male student being ridiculed by other african-american males for “trying to act white” or “wanting to be white” because he had gotten positive recognition by a teacher or the administration, or, was -hold your breath- reading. it’s a form of intra-cultural oppression that stifles achievement, and its manifestation is this disparity described in your post. i never saw white students harassing an african-american who was trying to learn. culture vs. intitutions, which is really the stronger force?

    maybe this is the area of research that cornel west should be focusing more on. i think it would do more to help improve the situations of african-americans than does his obsession with hip-hop. so much of the effort is on making institutions not just neutral toward race and gender, but favor women and minorities yet, so little effort is made in trying to alter the particular cultural values held by these at risk groups, which more than offsets societies affirmative actions. the above statistics are the product of cultural relativism at work. it’s not just the taunts at the micro level that keep these boys down, but also the demands at the macro level. the signals in the uncle tom (powell)/aunt jemima (rice) attacks don’t go unnoticed by impressionable african-american youth. and the obligations placed on minorities and new arrivals by the multiculturalists that they resist succumbing to the dominant “white” (i.e. western) culture.

    from the feminist standpoint, this was a feminist post, more must be done to undermine our allegiance to the cultural traditions bequeathed to us by those sexist/racist ‘dead white males’. for as long as the majority continues to buy into that bothersome western culture, you know the one responsible for advances in ‘life’ (medicine, civil rights) ‘liberty’ (democratic-republics, capitalism) and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ (surplus, technology, science, arts), how will our social(ist) revolutions ever move-on(.org)?

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