9 ms·

The most moving and informed coverage of the US education system I've heard have all been through This American Life What makes you think it is the most inform

The most moving and informed coverage of the US education system I've heard have all been through This American Life What makes you think it is the most informed coverage? These episodes only give you one side of the argument. If you want the other side try reading The Long Crusade and/or The Burden of Brown by Professor Raymond Wolters. I also myself wrote a long blog post about integration/desegregation as it happened in Boston, a post based on very credible academic histories, which gives a very different take than the NPR/PBS take: https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston

burkaman 10y ago
This seems well-researched, and there are some reasonable points, but your section #4 and conclusion really discredit the rest of the article. Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense". > Now imagine growing up and looking forward to playing on the same football team as your elders in front a cheering hometown crowd. And then that dream is taken away from you by some unelected judge. At his order, another tribe invades, takes your spot on the football team and dates the girl you were wooing. You are not going to like that very much. You might want to join with your tribal brothers and brawl with this opposing tribe in the lunch room. And of course the other tribe is going to fight back. What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good. Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland. That line of thinking is, as you say, cartoonishly racist. And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be. The fact that black people do worse than white people in school is a problem worth solving, not a convenient method of grouping students, right? The only way this status quo could be acceptable is if you think black kids are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. Your article on racism does bring that up, but I can't tell if it's a belief you hold. If you do believe that, you should be more clear about it in this school segregation article, otherwise your conclusions don't make sense.
- devinhelton 10y ago
  Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense". My view on tribalism is similar to my view on "greed" or "personal self-interest." It exists. We are a tribal species, as any survey of human history will show, from the time of the Chimpanzees onward ( https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431/ https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/... ). Specifically, humans form tribes that are some combination of clan/ethnicity based, or are synthetic tribes based on ideology/beliefs/religion/nationalism. Social policy must be made with awareness of this tribal nature, not in defiance of it. Tribalism can be reduced, channeled, defanged, changed in form (to be non-racially based), but only by being aware of it. What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good. Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland. One of the main arguments for integration is needed to fix historical problems of bad race relations. My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed. Yeah, maybe working class teenagers should be less tribalistic and shouldn't think that way. But in the 1970s Boston was a city of tribes, it had neighborhoods of Irish ethnics, Italian ethnics, Jews, and blacks. Just adding 400 kids from another tribe to a school, and creating competition for the things that 16 year old male hominids value, was going to create conflict. I am just pointing out that the "solution" to race problems made race problems worse, and for very obvious reasons. Even if you think that forced integration was a necessary way to break the back of tribalism altogether -- there should have been a plan to actually break tribalism. Just throwing the kids together and putting the two groups in competition was not going to accomplish the goal of breaking tribalism. And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be. I didn't go into the reasons for the disparities because it wasn't really relevant to the point about de facto segregation. For instance, the NY Times has run a bunch of articles blaming academic gaps on stuff like early childhood nutrition [1], or disadvantaged kids having as many high-quality words spoken to them [2] [3], or not as many books in the house [4]. Conservatives sometimes blame single-parent families and poor attitudes towards education. So let's say that those one of those early childhood or home-based reasons are the reasons for the academic achievement gap. The result is that the achievement gap is already in place by the time the kids are at 8th grade or 10th grade. So just merging the black kids who are two grade levels behind into the same classrooms as white kids isn't going to help the black kids at all. It's just going to make it really hard for the teacher to help kids who will need an entirely different lesson plan. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/for-poor-schoolchildren-a-poverty-of-words.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/for-poor-schoolch... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/quality-of-words-not-quantity-is-crucial-to-language-skills-study-finds.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/quality-of-words-not-q... [4] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/a-book-in-every-home-and-then-some/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/a-book-in-ev...
brownbat 10y ago
It's definitely well cited, but the issues you lay out are completely orthogonal to my concerns, which aren't primarily about race or integration. If you are at a failing school and can get to a good school and want to learn, it seems immoral to force you to stay at the failing school. Your thoughts about race relations or the quality of particular facilities don't really move me on this point.

burkaman 10y ago

This seems well-researched, and there are some reasonable points, but your section #4 and conclusion really discredit the rest of the article. Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense". > Now imagine growing up and looking forward to playing on the same football team as your elders in front a cheering hometown crowd. And then that dream is taken away from you by some unelected judge. At his order, another tribe invades, takes your spot on the football team and dates the girl you were wooing. You are not going to like that very much. You might want to join with your tribal brothers and brawl with this opposing tribe in the lunch room. And of course the other tribe is going to fight back. What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good. Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland. That line of thinking is, as you say, cartoonishly racist. And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be. The fact that black people do worse than white people in school is a problem worth solving, not a convenient method of grouping students, right? The only way this status quo could be acceptable is if you think black kids are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. Your article on racism does bring that up, but I can't tell if it's a belief you hold. If you do believe that, you should be more clear about it in this school segregation article, otherwise your conclusions don't make sense.

devinhelton 10y ago
Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense". My view on tribalism is similar to my view on "greed" or "personal self-interest." It exists. We are a tribal species, as any survey of human history will show, from the time of the Chimpanzees onward ( https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431/ https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/... ). Specifically, humans form tribes that are some combination of clan/ethnicity based, or are synthetic tribes based on ideology/beliefs/religion/nationalism. Social policy must be made with awareness of this tribal nature, not in defiance of it. Tribalism can be reduced, channeled, defanged, changed in form (to be non-racially based), but only by being aware of it. What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good. Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland. One of the main arguments for integration is needed to fix historical problems of bad race relations. My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed. Yeah, maybe working class teenagers should be less tribalistic and shouldn't think that way. But in the 1970s Boston was a city of tribes, it had neighborhoods of Irish ethnics, Italian ethnics, Jews, and blacks. Just adding 400 kids from another tribe to a school, and creating competition for the things that 16 year old male hominids value, was going to create conflict. I am just pointing out that the "solution" to race problems made race problems worse, and for very obvious reasons. Even if you think that forced integration was a necessary way to break the back of tribalism altogether -- there should have been a plan to actually break tribalism. Just throwing the kids together and putting the two groups in competition was not going to accomplish the goal of breaking tribalism. And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be. I didn't go into the reasons for the disparities because it wasn't really relevant to the point about de facto segregation. For instance, the NY Times has run a bunch of articles blaming academic gaps on stuff like early childhood nutrition [1], or disadvantaged kids having as many high-quality words spoken to them [2] [3], or not as many books in the house [4]. Conservatives sometimes blame single-parent families and poor attitudes towards education. So let's say that those one of those early childhood or home-based reasons are the reasons for the academic achievement gap. The result is that the achievement gap is already in place by the time the kids are at 8th grade or 10th grade. So just merging the black kids who are two grade levels behind into the same classrooms as white kids isn't going to help the black kids at all. It's just going to make it really hard for the teacher to help kids who will need an entirely different lesson plan. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/for-poor-schoolchildren-a-poverty-of-words.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/for-poor-schoolch... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/quality-of-words-not-quantity-is-crucial-to-language-skills-study-finds.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/quality-of-words-not-q... [4] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/a-book-in-every-home-and-then-some/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/a-book-in-ev...

brownbat 10y ago

It's definitely well cited, but the issues you lay out are completely orthogonal to my concerns, which aren't primarily about race or integration. If you are at a failing school and can get to a good school and want to learn, it seems immoral to force you to stay at the failing school. Your thoughts about race relations or the quality of particular facilities don't really move me on this point.