We last encountered California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell back in 2007, in The Supe Is Nuts: Just When You Thought California Schools Couldn’t Get Any Worse…. There we saw that he was alarmed at the dramatic racial and ethnic achievement gaps, but his response — attributing the gaps to “cultural ignorance” in the schools — was, at least to me, as alarming as the gaps.
An example:
Like most professional school people, Supt. O’Connell is no doubt a good liberal. Therefore, according to this account of his “Summit” in the San Francisco Chronicle,
[l]ike many educators, O’Connell assumed the culprit was poverty. Then he noticed an even wider ethnic disparity among students who were not poor….
The realization was a jolt: Being black or Latino — not poor — was what the low-scorers had in common. And it changed everything.
Based on this summary, I’d be more tempted to say it deranged everything.
O’Connell now believes that widespread cultural ignorance within the California school system is responsible for the poor academic performance of many black and Latino students in school.
He offered the example of black children who learn at church that it’s good to clap, speak loudly and be a bit raucous. But doing the same thing at school, where 72 percent of teachers are white and may be unfamiliar with such customs, will get them in trouble, he said.
Do they learn at church that it’s a good idea to behave that way in school? Do young Hispanics learn the same thing … at Communion? Are teachers on the public payroll supposed to tell black kids that what they learn in church is wrong? Are low math scores (and the math scores of non-poor blacks are worse than those of poor whites and Asians) really the result of clapping in church? Could we please have a control group of, say, black Episcopalians, who presumably don’t clap and shout so much?
With an analysis as wacky as this, you can almost predict Supt. O’Connell’s response:
O’Connell and top educators in the California Department of Education have taken hours of racial sensitivity training, which O’Connell wants to extend to teachers statewide….
Actually, his response was even worse than this, but to see how you’ll have to go back to that original post. I bring up this history here only because now he’s at it again. Reader Linda Seebach as pointed me to a post by Joanne Jacobs that points to a post by Bill Evers (who, Joanne points out, was a key player in writing California’s demanding math and science standards), who notes that O’Connell “has set off alarm bells” by stating a desire to California’s academic-content standards in order, as O’Connell says,
to fully engage both students and teachers in the learning process in a way that sees both parties benefit and helps to better prepare students for success in the economy of the 21st century.
Evers is having none of it:
Translation from education jargon: He wants to water down California’s existing high standards in the name of the wolly concept of “21st-century skills,” that is, communicating with each other, working in groups, media literacy, and so forth. He wants to subtract from classroom time spent on solid subject-matter content to teach these supposed stand-alone skills.
All this presumably after ensuring that all California teachers have undergone supervised racial sensitivity training.
I think readers outside California may not realize that the old model of white majority/Latino minority no longer applies in that state. Whites are 30% or less of K-12 students, and forecast to drop further, while Latinos are 50% of K-12. Again, O’Connell’s excuse of “white privilege” for the poor performance of Latino students will be meaningless when the last whites have been driven from California. Then again, he can always blame “post-colonial stress syndrome” for the 50% Latino drop-out rate.
I have been to a couple of African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches on more than one occasion, and the services I have seen are, in fact, very restrained and dignified. I have no idea what percentage of blacks attend the more exuberant churches, but the idea that overt ebullience is a feature of black churches per se is not correct.
In any event, a number of white students attend churches with such enthusiastic preaching and audience participation. I wonder whether anyone knows if those students likewise encounter problems in school or whether it affects their academic progress.
I doubt anyone is actually going to look into this, of course.
When is graduation from a public school “education” going to include a requirement of a demonstrable grasp of how
auto/house/”education”/ “credit” card loans work?
How to navigate the tax code, and the “revised” statutes, might be practical aspects of a “basic” public education as well.
But, I digress…..
I wonder how many of those blacks children who clap and shout in church service are then taught in the same church to sit quietly in Sunday School.
The problem is not one of cultural sensitivity. Its one of IQ. No matter how “unfair” it seems to ascribe the differences to IQ, it is hard to escape that conclusion. Of course no one wants to raise this difficult point. I don’t think IQ necessarily needs to lead to a genetic discussion either. I believe it is malleable, and more than anything, the relevant underclass culture must be changed. Good luck in having this debate.
Willow,
Whenever I post to Inside Higher Education with a comment that points of differences in IQ, upbringing, culture, murder rate, etc., between blacks and whites, my post is removed. This is because these facts do not fit the editor’s world view that race, class, and gender, determine the physics of the world. It is impossible to have a rational interchange with such people. Unfortunately, IHE heavily edits their comments section which gives a severe bias of “what people think.”
ACF