So Much Reform, So Little Change, part 2: the impact of race

Beginning with the first item on our list, (see previous post) one of Payne’s most disturbing observations about struggling schools is how quickly and early students are sorted into two categories: those who have potential, and those who don’t. This is often based on physical appearance, and prior to having any actual evidence! (In modern parlance, this is called having a ‘fixed’ mindset.)  Once so identified, teachers proceed to teach students differently, with higher quality interactions and higher expectations for the ‘smart’ kids.  This, of course, becomes reinforcing; the smart kids flourish (relatively); the ‘dumb’ kids begin to withdraw.

Then it gets worse. By the following year, the next teacher now has ‘data’ to back up her assumptions.  The effect on students is significant and long-lasting: research shows a high correlation between how students feel about their early years of public schooling and how likely they are to stay in school until graduation.

But there’s complicating factor at work here: low expectations on the part of teachers is not entirely unjustified. (Although the ‘sorting’ is.)  Years of experience have demonstrated to teachers that the barriers to success for these students is so high, that realistically, not many of them are going to ‘make it’. Teachers see the entire system as conspiring against their students. The administration is hopelessly inept (the average superintendent lasts less than three years) and the parents are unreachable. Why not invest your (unfairly) limited resources into the few kids who appear to have a chance?

Of course, such a view absolves teachers of responsibility for their role, and this mindset is a huge impediment to implementing systemic change. (That program may have worked where you come from, but it won’t work here, not with these kids!)  Payne refers to this as ‘racialist’ thinking. It’s not really racist in the sense that it isn’t a judgment as to genetic capacity - it’s not the kids’ fault, after all - but the impact is pretty much the same.  And this prejudging is just as common among Black teachers as White teachers.

Payne has a lot to say about race that is especially relevant in our current environment, and he spends an excellent chapter addressing one of the great mysteries of education policy: Why do Black students in relatively wealthy suburban schools not perform as well as their White counterparts? 

There is a common assumption – misunderstanding - by policy-makers is that race is essentially a stand-in for poverty, and that if you address issues directly relating to poverty, ‘race’ is not relevant. And while it is clearly important to address the issues significantly impacted by poverty– including physical health, parental support, the sense of emotional safety, as well as actual resources - the idea that Black students are essentially the same as everyone else, and that they will respond to an intervention in pretty much in the same way as everyone else, ignores the world we actually live in.

The problem is that our cultural environment is essentially poisonous for students of color. 

In our society, we tend to reduce the concept of racism to its most extreme manifestation; that is, when a ‘prejudiced’ persons discriminates in an explicit way. By that definition, racism really is largely a thing of the past; to act in a blatantly racist way has become culturally unacceptable. No one in the public eye gets away with it today. (Even the racists have to pretend not to be racists.)

Here’s one example of the insidious effect of cultural racism. There are years of studies demonstrating that in our society, Blacks are less ‘trusting’ than Whites. (Not surprisingly, since the more vulnerable one feels, the less trusting one tends to be.)  Now consider the impact of this on educational capacity, where the student-teacher relationship is so critical. For example, how willing is a student to ask for help if he’s afraid of reinforcing a cultural stereotype that ‘his kind’ isn’t particularly smart?  Most insidiously, over time, these perceptions get internalized.

But an even larger issue is the degree to which one “trusts the future”; that is, how much control do you think you have over your own fate? Again, not surprisingly, the degree of control that one believes one has is closely correlated to future achievement - more so “than all school-related factors put together.”

Further, this is not an irrational assumption. It is hard to argue that the system isn’t rigged. There are mountains of data that show Blacks are disproportionately disciplined for similar transgressions as Whites, both within the educational system, and without. What’s the point of making an effort if the system is rigged?  We cannot pretend that students are unaware of this.

This dynamic explains why immigrants from predominantly Black regions, such as Africa or the West Indies, often become more successful than African-Americans who have been here for generations. In their formative years, they weren’t poisoned by the cultural water.  A wise person once said, “The sins of the fathers are visited upon their children, even unto the third and fourth generation.”  Think about that. From the time that we begin to address an idea in our collective psyche as false and dangerous, it takes three or four generations to root out its detrimental effects. And that’s if we don’t go into collective denial and take a generation ‘off’.

This goes a long way to explain the ironic sense of nostalgia that many older Black Americans have for the kind of education they received during the ‘good old days’ of white supremacy, even with resources that were typically a third of their White counterparts. They remember those schools as “symbols of institutionalized caring” in which “building men and women” was seen as part of the school leader's mission – and which included an explicit challenge to the notion of racial inferiority. There is something about this education that many older Black adults now wish they could give to their grandchildren. What has been lost is so significant that some still believe that desegregation was a deliberate plot to break the spirit of Black communities.