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Half of Black High School Students in the Bay Area Can Barely Read
- gloryjulio 4y agoIt's a sensitive topic and let's discuss the facts here. U need some accountability to let ppl work and study,that's the unfortunately truth. Study is hard and complete freedom doesn't work. Sometimed u need some grit and push. In the end it's the kids suffer
- madeofpalk 4y agoThe irony from the illiteracy of this comment is intentional or?
- gloryjulio 4y agoWhich part are you referring to?
- jagged-chisel 4y agounfortunately -> unfortunate The last sentence missing a word. One could argue the abbreviated words are also an indication.
- gloryjulio 4y agoThanks for pointing those out. The comment was typed out on the phone
- H8crilA 4y agoPutting aside the quality of schools: how is this possible in the era of smartphones? I always thought that smartphones will put the final end to illiteracy, at least because of texting.
- dtech 4y agoYou don't really need real reading skills to use TikTok, Youtube, call or send voice messages.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- toby- 4y agoUnless you're texting friends who, themselves, can barely read and write... Plus, texting has always featured slang, abbreviations, lack of punctuation, shortened spelling, etc. Not the best to learn from, perhaps.
- jjulius 4y agoI am the only person I know who texts in full, complete sentences and statements, without abbreviating anything. I use all punctuation correctly, as much as I can. It's not a conscious thing, it's just what I do. I know of almost nobody else who does this. Shorthand is encouraged, acronyms abound, nobody actually gives a shit if you misspell something, punctuation is thrown to the wind with reckless abandon. I don't see how texting could put an end to illiteracy. If anything, it promotes it.
- Aperocky 4y agoSeems like they can read your message just fine and type back a reply that you can understand. Literacy attained.
- quantified 4y agoLiteracy sufficient to understand the terms of an apartment lease, a car loan, a court order? Agreed that reading and writing are two different skills.
- jjulius 4y agoThank you for this clarification. :)
- Overtonwindow 4y agoThis is depressing and an absolute travesty. If this was anywhere else but California I might look to the parents for blame, but here I blame the teachers and the school system. Maybe I'm over thinking this, but the public education curriculum in major cities seem to have strayed far from making sure that every child is drilled in the basics: Basic reading, writing, and mathematics.
- Arainach 4y agoWhy do you believe that curriculum is the issue? Large class sizes with underpaid teachers asked to play babysitter, teacher, and test prep tutor, all while being given no flexibility in approach or real ability to discipline are all major issues. Administration that won't support teacher decisions and will push back if teachers actually try to fail students even if they don't turn in anything leaves this as an inevitable outcome.
- poorbutdebtfree 4y agoDefund AP classes and redistribute surplus resources into remedial reading. It's that simple.
- jobs_throwaway 4y agoDeprive the successful kids of challenging coursework to coddle the unsuccessful ones. That'll turn out great
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Pigalowda 4y agoThe old “all children left behind” trick? That’ll work once I guess
- silisili 4y agoUm, no. The way to solve this is not to just make everyone dumber in the name of equity.
- muh_gradle 4y agoNo that's a terrible idea.
- diebeforei485 4y agoYour assumption here is that schools with advanced classes spend more resources per student. That is absolutely untrue. Lowell High School in SF spends a lot less than other high schools. Same with Stuyvesant in NYC. This means the kids falling behind get more resources. Your proposal will result in higher spending, not lower.
- unsupp0rted 4y agoIs this satirical about the “defund the police” movement? If so, it’s quite well done.
- peepeepoopoo3 4y ago
- say_it_as_it_is 4y agoWhat percentage of Americans can "barely read" according to those standards? This isn't just a problem specific to black high school students in the Bay Area.
- diebeforei485 4y agoSounds like some of these teachers and school administrators should focus on the fundamentals like reading instead of chasing the latest trends to get themselves in the news so they can run for future political office. So many politicians are former school administrators. It's a problem.
- threatofrain 4y agoTeachers aren't aiming for political prestige... I'm surprised you think someone can just teach harder in a classroom of 30-40 kids to make the education differences go away.
- diebeforei485 4y agoIt is very common in the Bay Area (the subject of this article) for former school people to run for political office. Especially on the far left of the political spectrum. It is a real problem.
- threatofrain 4y agoThe real problem is teachers running for political office? What % of teachers go for political office?
- diebeforei485 4y ago[flagged]
- shuckles 4y agoThe educational system has been teaching an approach to reading that’s known to not work for 20+ years, and this is the consequence for populations that don’t have access to other means of instruction. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-reading-wars/376990/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-rea... The bureaucrats and tenured academics who have doubled down on this approach should be punished.
- Neuro_Gear 4y ago[flagged]
- debatem1 4y agoSuggesting that black people need "more discipline" to learn because of "selective breeding" is plain-as-day racism.
- Neuro_Gear 4y agoObservation of historical facts isn't racism. They were bred to be subserviant.
- muh_gradle 4y agoYou are nothing more than a racist and you should feel ashamed of what you are.
- 10xDev 4y agoJust read your bio and wow did that make me cringe.
- eesmith 4y agoYou've made that up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_S... > Slave owners often bred their slaves to produce more workers. The function of such breeding farms was to produce as many slaves as possible for the sale and distribution throughout the South, in order to meet its needs. That's not selective breeding for subservience. That's (non-selective) breeding for numbers. We know those white male slave owners raped their female slaves and had children by them. Quoting "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself" by Harriet A. Jacobs, 1861 at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11030 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11030 : > Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slave-trader’s hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight. That's not selective breeding for subservience. Further, lighter-skinned slaves were sold at a premium over darker-skinned slaves. https://swer.wtamu.edu//sites/default/files/Data/161-178-61-226-1-PB.pdf https://swer.wtamu.edu//sites/default/files/Data/161-178-61-... > Large positive values for these variables indicate that skin color was important in determining slave price. Kotlikoff had estimated that the light-skin premium was 5.3% for females and 2.3% for males. My estimates are larger: especially when using the Matched Models Method: 11.1% and 9.7% for females and males respectively. ... the slavocracy’s penchant for light skin really did conflict with their pursuit of agricultural profit. This isn't selective breeding for subservience. How would that breeding program even work? When does selection occur? A subservient child might be quite different at 20 years old. An owner might get, what, 3 generations of breeding done in a life-time? And that requires a large population of slaves to draw from. So it needs to be a multi-generational project. While at the same time there's all the other slave owners just breeding for numbers, making effective multi-generational selective breeding just about impossible.
- 0xDEF 4y agoWhat is the number of students per teacher at these schools?
- jobs_throwaway 4y ago>Moreover the idea that Black people don’t value education is absurd. My father was illiterate and was very conscious about it. He was dedicated to ensure I could read so that I wouldn’t struggle as he did. As early as Kindergarten my father made me do ‘Hooked on Phonics’ sets at grades beyond my age level. He had me read books and I had siblings to read to me at night. Thus, I never once struggled with English classes in grade school or college and breezed right through them. The claim is absurd because of an anecdote that goes against the evidence?
- threatofrain 4y agoThe author goes on in the comments to blame culture, but the author says that black culture in some sense had a destiny due to 400 years of oppression.
- mc32 4y agoAs far as I know, all groups have parents who care about education (exemplified by some stereotypical populations) but also have within their ranks parents (and thus children) who don't care --the proverbial kids form the wrong side of the tracks (or trailer parks, if you prefer). So yes, we can find exemplary parents in all representative populations, but also parents who have abrogated their responsibilities when rearing children.
- jobs_throwaway 4y agoOf course. The populations are far too big for that not to be the case. What matters is what portion of a group's parents give a shit and what portion don't. I think its clear that Asian parents as a whole are far more likely to be in the 'give a shit' category, based on their children's educational results (even controlling for socioeconomic status)
- quantified 4y ago"Black people" is like saying "Africa". Too many different pockets of people and individuals within them. Barack Obama and Henry Louis Gates Jr. exist alongside urban drug dealers. All statements like this need credible qualification with statistics and demographics to be meaningful.
- timwaagh 4y agoUnsurprising and consistent with other statistics
- jobs_throwaway 4y ago>Much media hay has been made about a report suggesting each Black resident in San Francisco receive $5 million. It’s obviously not going to be paid especially by a local government (though it ought to be federally done). There it is
- crop_rotation 4y agoAm I reading it right? 5 million to each Black resident? This sounds so ridiculous that I don't even know how to comment. Does the Federal government even have that much money (I know the Fed can print) to give that kind of money?
- tomrod 4y agoReparations often sound difficult to comprehend.
- crop_rotation 4y agoThere are reparations and there is stupidity. 5M USD to each is stupidity.
- tomrod 4y agoCan you walk me through your thought process why this amount is too high? What would a proper amount look like?
- crop_rotation 4y agoGiven that the article says the Federal government should do it, let's assume it is for each eligible recipient in the USA (since the Federal government obviously can't hand out massive cash to a small geographic area). As per https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/03/25/the-growing-diversity-of-black-america/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/03/25/the-gro..., "46.8 million people in the U.S. identified their race as Black". Taking 5M for each, you get 234T USD. Where is that money going to come from? > What would a proper amount look like? A proper amount would have to be mathematically feasible to not be ridiculous. The policy implications of any such feasible plan are nuanced and might or might not make sense. 234T USD does not make sense though.
- BariumBlue 4y agoI don't think the article ever explained WHY. It has a couple hypotheses, but I would definitely like to know what the root issue(s) are or could be. It sounds like the article writer didn't know though. I guess there's a need for more studies and data?
- stathibus 4y agoThe article says nothing that hasn't been said a thousand times. I don't mean to direct my ire at you personally, but I frankly find it frustrating the degree to which the rich tech class gets fresh wind of this every few weeks, says "gee whiz something should be done!" and then continues scrolling their feed. Public school teachers have been crying and screaming about widespread societal failure for literally decades now.
- ahazred8ta 4y agoThe Blackboard Jungle and Up The Down Staircase described failed schools with severe discipline problems in the 50s and 60s. This is not a new development.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoTo be fair “barely read” is not the same as “below grade level.” First, grade level is defined in California as being the median as of 1998 (I think). The figures in here indicate these students are close to but under the median. This is not nearly as dire as “can barely read.” I’m not apologizing for the stark demographic different which is indicative of terrible social ills breaking along racial lines. But to address a problem you need to honest about it, and it’s not the case that black high school students are illiterate or close to it. They’re just generally below the median, which is unsurprising given the related metrics for other larger demographics.
- blindriver 4y agoCalifornia and especially San Francisco has been under decades of progressive Democratic government. The result is LA and SF are a complete mess. They can't use the Republicans as scapegoats here. SF teachers have been having a terrible time in the last 5 years because SFUSD has been run by progressive extremists that wanted to spend $2 million changing school names instead of worrying about things like Black literacy. Somehow they think changing school names are better for Black students than actually getting them to read. And meanwhile SF teachers haven't been getting paid on time this year because of complete mess of their payroll system, which is forcing drastic action that puts the SFUSD in deeper financial trouble. I would hate to see Republicans get into power here, not especially because California Republicans are dumb as rocks, but I don't know what else will wake these California Democrats up. If Newsom has any aspirations to be president, and it certainly seems that way, I can guarantee you that running ads showing what LA and SF look like after decades of Democratic rule will destroy any chances of California Dems getting a modicum of power anywhere else in the country.
- alephnerd 4y agoThe issues in SFUSD and OUSD are orthogonal to SF local government tbh. A lot of the failure and persistent rot in the district is due to chronic underfunding - teachers in SFUSD and OUSD tend to earn half of what they could earn in SMUSD, SRVUSD, Fremont USD, etc. If you don't pay for talent, you ain't getting it.
- blindriver 4y agoI agree and disagree. I agree that if you don't pay for talent you're not going to get it. But SFUSD is so broken that no one wants to move here. And it's so broken that anyone who cares about education will pull their children and stick them in private school, which brings less money into SFUSD. This is a negative feedback loop and there's no way out of it. The entire political scene of SF and California dictate the makeup of SFUSD so I think it goes hand in hand. I think the fact that moderate centrists finally showed up to vote out the SFUSD board members and Boudin are an indication of what comes over the next few years. I hope the progressive extremists get kicked out of the Dems and get replaced by moderate centrists like what we've seen in the last year.
- duxup 4y agoLocal school district where I am has a part that is predominantly black, other part more diverse. Teachers don’t want to teach at the predominantly black schools (regardless of their own race). Violence, poverty, little to no parent engagement. When they have school conferences that half of the district teachers don’t have anything to do while the other half has parents lined up in the halls. And if there is parent engagement it is sometimes not positive. At one point the schools were accused of not providing enough support. More recently the sentiment is that too many black kids are identified as needing special education/ support… so now they are scared to provide / assign those services. I don’t know what the solutions are. It’s complex, it’s hard. There are reasons for all sorts of the individual issues, but as a whole they all feed into each other and the mountain of issues seem insurmountable.
- Neuro_Gear 4y ago[flagged]
- alephnerd 4y ago1. It's functional literacy at age group - not "unable to read Latin letters" 2. Ime, education in phonics honestly sucks and fails to take into account local and regional dialectic differences. Maybe treating AAVE (and other regional dialects, similar issues exist among White Appalachians in rural WV, TN, and KY for example due to the Scotch-Irish heavy register) as a second language might help bridge the gap. Clarence Thomas is an example of that kind of issue - his first language was Gullah (a mixed creole between West African languages and English) and it has had an impact on his own education earlier in his career.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rickreynoldssf 4y agoThat's one of the things that would happen when your school board cares more about renaming schools and hiding murals and getting rid of the one school in San Francisco that can feed into an Ivy League school (Lowell). The same people that supposedly care about minorities and other "disadvantaged" populations are they ones who are dooming them.
- tomrod 4y agoThis is abysmal. Outside of voting for local and federal officials who actually want to solve this, how can I help?
- Neuro_Gear 4y agoYou can't, there is no way to reverse this. The best thing to do is earn as little as one can, so as not to fund your destruction, and to get as far as you can from cities.
- tomrod 4y agoI disagree that fatalism is a meaningful course of action. Consider me a starfish thrower.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Thrower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Thrower
- Neuro_Gear 4y agoAn apt allagory of the situation. Stop collecting brownie points, and throw those stars!
- jschveibinz 4y agoThe best way to help is to figure out how to teach kids to read, and to expand their vocabulary, before kindergarten. Pre-K is where the answers are: that’s when the brain is most plastic.
- goodells 4y agoSometimes I check out /r/teachers to get an idea of what's going on in education. The general consensus is that behavior issues are completely out of control for a variety of reasons: - Shortage of dedicated special education teachers - Parents who won't discipline kids at home - Top-down pushes from administration such as "restorative justice", "least restrictive environment", and a few other phrases that will make any classroom teacher's skin crawl - Unwillingness from administration to apply suspensions or expulsion due to how this ties to school funding - Lack of flexibility in the teaching job market due to teachers being a licensed profession and most states suspending a teacher's license if they quit mid-year, leaving apathetic teachers trapped in bad schools - Attempts to discipline non-white students frequently resulting in accusations of racism, making it not worth the trouble In the classroom, the end result seems to be that behavior meltdowns take up a disproportionate amount of a teacher's attention and they aren't empowered to deal with it, all at the expense of the quality of instruction for the rest of the students. The standardized test score metrics discussed here are a not too surprising consequence.
- josephcsible 4y ago> most states suspending a teacher's license if they quit mid-year, leaving apathetic teachers trapped in bad schools Imagine if Apple made you sign a non-compete to the effect of "I agree to never quit between August and June, with the punishment if I do being that I'm no longer allowed to develop software for anyone." That'd basically be indentured servitude and wouldn't last a minute in court. So why do we let public schools get away with it?
- kamaal 4y ago>>- Attempts to discipline non-white students frequently resulting in accusations of racism, making it not worth the trouble This sort of culture now is unfortunately getting common, in the era of 'getting cancelled' nobody wants to carry the burden of helping others. Everybody is just one hair trigger away from hurting other people's emotions despite their best intentions to help. What makes things more complicated is receiving help in many ways demands being humbled by the helper. This itself can be humiliating to go through. It could be misunderstood in a million different ways. And then you become the bad guy for helping and they become victims for receiving help. You lose in every possible way. Not only do you have to spend your time, energy and money to help them. You have also to risk getting cancelled for no fault of yours. And if you get cancelled, you are sanctioned for life. For this reason its not just the classroom or office mentorship, people today as little as don't bother telling a person their wallet dropped from their pockets in a bus, out of fear it could be construed as harassment. >>making it not worth the trouble This is where you arrive.
- monetus 4y agoThis is somewhat tangential, but for anyone who thinks various american dialects aren't "proper" english could use the perspective of north carolina university's life and language project - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8QFpVgPl9tQ&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8QFpVgPl9tQ&feature=youtu.be
- silisili 4y agoAfter reading the article, I feel like the author makes fair points at the beginning, then kinda goes sideways. Says it's likely black American cultural, parent involvement is huge, etc. Hard problems to solve. But solutions such as reparations, segregated schools, and the forced hiring of kids by local companies to hire based on skin color seem way off the mark to actually achieving those goals. Kids spend 7 or 8 hours a day in schools, with supposedly the goal of educating children. How can they keep failing so badly? If my job was to build houses, and I only ever built half of it adequately, with the rest in disrepair, I'd be fired. Same with about any job. Except educators, for some reason? And teachers complain it's not their fault, they don't have the tools, they are forced to pass kids along, etc. So who's to blame? Burn the system to the ground, fire the administrators, and let's try again. Because finger pointing isn't helpful. We really, really need to look at our failing education systems first. Having outside resources lead to way better educational outcomes tells me that schools aren't doing their primary objective, at all.
- jschveibinz 4y agoI don’t think that schools are really for learning. They are for watching and controlling kids, socializing kids, and introducing kids to educational materials all while parents go to work. Learning happens at home. Parents or guardians are the answer (or origination) to this problem. I might be out on a limb, but if you are posting on this site, you were likely reading before you started kindergarten or soon thereafter. Your parents most likely taught you to read. Research shows that kids that aren’t reading by third grade are not likely to ever really learn to read.
- photochemsyn 4y agoI'd guess class size and teacher competence are the two main institutional factors (which separate expensive private schools with ~15 kids per teacher from public schools with ~30), and enough food, sleep, parental involvement, extracurricular activites etc. with respect to the home living situation are the major factors. Individual attention makes a big difference when it comes to lifting average performance, as students falling behind can get help before it reaches the drop-out level. On the 'cultural expectations' front, rural white America has some similar issues to urban black America, of the 'why do you want to go to college' or 'being good at math is for nerds' or 'take your nose out of the books and play more sports' variety. My own rather jaded cynical view is that this is a setup deliberately engineered by the ruling class, as if everyone could do math well nobody would ever have bought subprime-adjustable-rate mortgage loans, as they'd have realized they'd be better off just saving money by renting until they could afford a fixed-rate loan. The ability to estimate probabilities and to calculate compound interest should be required skills for high-school graduates. An ignorant population is more easily fleeced - and let's not forget why it was a crime to teach slaves to read and write in the Old South, either. The recent attempts to lower math standards for high school students in California are probably motivated by that kind of agenda.
- Pigalowda 4y agoNot everything is because of the “elite” or whatever. It could just be some very extremely and totally obvious thing you could literally go observe for yourself. With your eyeballs. Outside.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- curun1r 4y agoJust a reminder that this isn't new. When I was about to enter high school in the early 90s, Oakland was trying to end-around testing standards for black students by declaring Ebonics as a separate language so that it could classify black students under ESL standards. That blew up and they had to walk that change back, but it shows just how far back this issue goes. My personal view on this is that it's really underappreciated how self-perpetuating something like this is. I learned to read at a fairly early age and I attribute that to my mom reading to me on a nightly basis. Having someone verbalize something while you follow along just makes it so much easier to grok once you start doing it on your own. The kids referred to in this article will have parents who were the inspiration for the Ebonics idea. How many of them would have read to their kids every night?
- chkaloon 4y agoThe first part says the comparison of Asian to Black is invalid because most Asians are recent immigrants. Do we have any numbers controlling for immigration timeframe?
- 10xDev 4y agoHere is the thing. You can give someone all the tools, all the resources in the world but someone who doesn't have an ounce of intellectual curiosity will remain ignorant. It sounds obvious when you say it but many seem to think that better schools will just solve educational problems.
- animitronix 4y agoLet's incentivize taking your kid to the library, and reading to them. It all starts there.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- giardini 4y agoIf they don't care then why should I care, spend my money to help them, etc.? There are enough people who can read "at their age level". We'll make do with those (and with ChatGPT - a "just-in-time technology if I've ever seen one!).
- bradgranath 4y agoThe US public education system largely stopped teaching kids to read 30 years ago. First it was memorization, but that has given way to literally teaching kids to guess. The rich kids get tutors. The poor ones don’t. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2021/11/21/problems-with-lucy-calkins-curriculum-go-beyond-reading-to-writing/?sh=34e6726650c9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2021/11/21/proble...